Broad access to automated cars (ACs) that can reliably and unconditionally drive in all environments is still some years away. Urban areas pose a particular challenge to ACs, since even perfectly reliable systems may be forced to execute sudden reactive driving maneuvers in hard-to-predict hazardous situations. This may negatively surprise the driver, possibly causing discomfort, anxiety or loss of trust, which might be a risk for the acceptance of the technology in general. To counter this, we suggest an explanatory windshield display interface with augmented reality (AR) elements to support driver situation awareness (SA). It provides the driver with information about the car’s perceptive capabilities and driving decisions. We created a prototype in a human-centered approach and implemented the interface in a mixed-reality driving simulation. We conducted a user study to assess its influence on driver SA. We collected objective SA scores and self-ratings, both of which yielded a significant improvement with our interface in good (medium effect) and in bad (large effect) visibility conditions. We conclude that explanatory AR interfaces could be a viable measure against unwarranted driver discomfort and loss of trust in critical urban situations by elevating SA.
Figure 1. We present and evaluate a novel user interface for indoor navigation, incorporating two modes. In augmented reality (AR) mode, navigation instructions are shown as an overlay over the live camera image and the phone is held as depicted in Picture a). In virtual reality (VR) mode, a correctly oriented 360 • panorama image is shown when holding the phone as in Picture b). The interface particularly addresses the vision-based localization method by including special UI elements that support the acquisition of "good" query images. Screenshot c) shows a prototype incorporating the presented VR user interface.
ABSTRACTMobile location recognition by capturing images of the environment (visual localization) is a promising technique for indoor navigation in arbitrary surroundings. However, it has barely been investigated so far how the user interface (UI) can cope with the challenges of the vision-based localization technique, such as varying quality of the query images. We implemented a novel UI for visual localization, consisting of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) views that actively communicate and ensure localization accuracy. If necessary, the system encourages the user to point the smartphone at distinctive regions to improve localization quality. We evaluated the UI in an experimental navigation task with a prototype, informed by initial evaluation results using design mockups. We found that VR can contribute to efficient and effective indoor navigation even at unreliable location and orientation accuracy. We discuss identified challenges and share lessons learned as recommendations for future work.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.