Until full autonomy is achieved in cars, drivers will still be expected to take over control of driving, and critical warnings will be essential. This paper presents a comparison of abstract versus... Show More

Until full autonomy is achieved in cars, drivers will still be expected to take over control of driving, and critical warnings will be essential. This paper presents a comparison of abstract versus language-based multimodal warnings signifying handovers of control in autonomous cars. While using an autonomous car simulator, participants were distracted from the road by playing a game on a tablet. An automation failure together with a car in front braking was then simulated; a rare but very critical situation for a non-attentive driver to be in. Multimodal abstract or language-based warnings signifying this situation were then delivered, either from the simulator or from the tablet, in order to discover the most effective location. Results showed that abstract cues, including audio, and cues delivered from the tablet improved handovers. This indicates the potential of moving simple but salient autonomous car warnings to where a gaming side task takes place.

Studies have found that drivers tend to neglect their surrounding traffic during automated driving. This may lead to a late and inefficient resumption of control in case of handover of the driving... Show More

Studies have found that drivers tend to neglect their surrounding traffic during automated driving. This may lead to a late and inefficient resumption of control in case of handover of the driving task to the driver. The authors evaluated the effectiveness of a vibrotactile seat displaying spatial information regarding vehicles approaching from behind to enhance the driver preparedness to the handover of control. A simulator experiment, involving 26 participants, showed that when drivers were required to regain control of the vehicle, having a vibrotactile seat improved speed and efficiency of reactions in scenarios requiring lane changing immediately following a handover. In addition, eye-tracking analysis showed that the participants had more systematic scan patterns of the mirrors in the first two seconds following the transition of control request. Interestingly, this effect exists in-spite of the finding that during automated driving mode, having a vibrotactile display led to fewer glances at the road.

This paper describes the research and development process of an in-vehicle user experience using Skyline, an automotive prototyping platform created in Intel Labs to empower interaction designers... Show More

This paper describes the research and development process of an in-vehicle user experience using Skyline, an automotive prototyping platform created in Intel Labs to empower interaction designers and user experience researches to rapidly and iteratively develop and test in-vehicle user experience concepts. The paper describes the hardware and software components of Skyline in depth and how to configure them to suit individual researcher needs. The paper also presents a case study to exemplify the design making process that Skyline enables. From ideation to use-case creation, prototyping and validation through user assessment, the paper showcases the benefits of capturing early qualitative user feedback as support for rapid prototyping walking through a study titled Agency vs. Control and the associated interactions inside the cockpit. Ten defined use-cases are developed and integrated into a hero scenario in Skyline. High fidelity HMI concepts are tested and validated over the course of six months with feedback from a total of fifty users.

Driving is a safety critical task that requires a high level of attention from the driver. Although drivers have limited attentional resources, they often perform secondary tasks such as eating or... Show More

Driving is a safety critical task that requires a high level of attention from the driver. Although drivers have limited attentional resources, they often perform secondary tasks such as eating or using a mobile phone. When performing multiple tasks in the vehicle, the driver can become overloaded and the risk of a crash is increased. If a vehicle is aware that the driver is currently under high workload, the vehicle functionality can be changed in order to minimise any further demand. Traditionally, workload is measured using physiological sensors that require often intrusive and expensive equipment. Another approach may be to use vehicle telemetry data as a performance measure for workload. In this paper, the authors present the Warwick-JLR Driver Monitoring Dataset (DMD) and analyse it to investigate the feasibility of using vehicle telemetry data for determining the driver workload. They perform a statistical analysis of subjective ratings, physiological data, and vehicle telemetry data collected during a track study. A data mining methodology is then presented to build predictive models using this data, for the driver workload monitoring problem.