Catch My Drift: Elevating Situation Awareness for Highly Automated Driving with an Explanatory Windshield Display User Interface

Abstract

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.

A Systematic Review of Virtual Reality Applications for Automated Driving: 2009–2020

“…The majority of the studies investigated safety aspects for manual driving (see Table 5), although six studies examined highly automated driving, and two studies evaluated mixed traffic situations, where both manual and automated vehicles share the road. Interestingly, only one study (Lindemann et al, 2018b) evaluated safety in the context of fully automated vehicles. Most studies regarded situation awareness and crash warnings, however, also smartphone usage and teleoperated driving were investigated.…”

Multimodal Warnings in Remote Operation: The Case Study on Remote Driving

“…Several multimodal interfaces have been proposed to enhance the human operator's situational awareness while remotely operating [13][14][15][16][17][18]. The effectiveness of individual modalities conveying information to the remote operator has been studied on several occasions.…”

“…In this solution, the incoming sensor data from the vehicle was used to create a representation of the vehicle's location. Visual indicators augmented over the driving view may beneficially affect the safety and performance of driving, since the driver can see extra information without moving their gaze off the road [16]. A study by Park et al [17] proposes a system that overlays collision-warning information on the windshield during night driving.…”

“…The use of multimodal feedback was also explored in the context of automotive vehicles (AV) since the phenomena of situational awareness is similarly important in this context. The previous studies explored the use of added visual, haptic and auditory feedback [16,20,21] to communicate take-over requests from the vehicle to a driver or influence situational awareness with a semi-automated vehicle. The work by Lindemann et al [16] discussed that added visual cues (such as overlayed visual threats, warnings and indications) provide significantly increased situational awareness and enough information to drive in bad weather conditions.…”

“…The previous studies explored the use of added visual, haptic and auditory feedback [16,20,21] to communicate take-over requests from the vehicle to a driver or influence situational awareness with a semi-automated vehicle. The work by Lindemann et al [16] discussed that added visual cues (such as overlayed visual threats, warnings and indications) provide significantly increased situational awareness and enough information to drive in bad weather conditions. Thy also pointed out that the visual modality can communicate more complex information, whereas additional haptic or audio cues may be used to draw drivers' attention to the visually conveyed information.…”