Magdalena Gärtner

Four Eyes See More Than Two: Shared Gaze in the Car

Purposeful collaboration of driver and front-seat passenger can help in demanding driving situations and therefore increase safety. The characteristics of the car, as a context, limit the collaboration possibilities of the driver and front-seat passenger, though. In this paper, we present an approach that supports successful collaboration of the driver and front-seat passenger with regard to the contextual specifics. By capturing the front-seat passenger’s gaze and visualizing it for the driver, we create a collaborative space for information sharing in the car. We present the results from a study investigating the potentials of the co-driver’s gaze as means to support the driver during a navigational task. Our results confirm that the co-driver’s gaze can serve as helpful means to support the collaboration of driver and front-seat passenger in terms of perceived distraction and workload of the driver.

Shared Gaze in the Car: Towards a Better Driver-Passenger Collaboration

Many automotive tasks can potentially be seen as a collaborative activity between driver and front seat passenger. Nevertheless, the position of both passengers sitting in the front seat hinders a natural face to face communication. An assisting co-driver can thus lead to more distraction and misunderstanding because pointing out things becomes diffficult. We want to add a natural way of communication and present a prototype that captures the co-drivers gaze and visualizes it for the driver. With this setup we try to create a possibility for passengers to collaborate and share information e.g., during navigational tasks or to provide hints about upcoming hazards. We developed a prototype in a car simulator to explore the concept in a first explorative study setup. In this paper we describe our concept of using shared gaze in the car, the technical setup of the prototype as well as possible application scenarios and future studies.

Dad, Stop Crashing My Car!: Making Use of Probing to Inspire the Design of Future In-Car Interfaces

In order to envision novel in-car user interfaces, it is important to investigate driver and passenger behavior as well as to identify relevant context factors that influence this behavior. Automotive user interfaces are often concentrated on drivers and their needs, whereas passengers and their needs are paid little attention to. In this paper we report on a probing study, which aimed at revealing novel design ideas for interfaces for both, car drivers and passengers. The overall goal of the study was to get inspired by actual driver and passenger behavior. In particular, we investigated past behaviors and what we can learn from these episodes for automotive interface design. We illustrate the user-centered process of generating innovative design concepts for the automotive domain based on the results of the probing study. Additionally, we introduce three resulting design concepts by means of design sketches and textual descriptions to provide insights on the concrete results of our efforts. We discuss probing as a method to generate novel design ideas for the automotive UI community and reflect on the three emerged design concepts which focus on collaboration, behavior change, and entertainment in the car.

Utilizing a Digital Game as a Mediatory Artifact for Social Persuasion to Prevent Speeding

In this paper we present a game-based approach to stop a driver from speeding by means of social persuasion. The approach utilizes a digital game played by a passenger inside the car. The game serves as a mediatory artifact, which translates the speed of the car into in-game events, thus, nudging the passenger to communicate with the driver about his/her driving behavior. As a game we used Tetris, which was coupled to the speed of a virtual vehicle in our driving simulator. We designed four different in-game representations of the real car data and examined, which of these designs is most suitable to trigger an intuitive, understandable linkage between the speeding behavior and the corresponding in-game events in order to enable a prompt intervention of the passenger. We evaluated the four designs in an exploratory user study. Our findings highlight the feasibility of our approach, as even passengers, who were rather uninvolved in the driving task, were successfully encouraged to slow down the driver. Based on our study results, we recommend a hybrid design strategy for the game, between designing for a dynamically increasing in-game challenge to foster passenger engagement based on fun, and simultaneously intervening dynamically in the playability of the game to foster communication with the driver to pave the way for social persuasion in the car.

Persuasion in the Car: Probing Potentials

The automotive domain has recently investigated interfaces to persuade drivers to drive safer or in a more sustainable way. So far, these systems are rather technology driven and mostly do not follow a user centered design process. Our aim is to widen the scope of automotive persuasive interfaces and bring the user into the loop. We present a probing study aiming at the identification of persuasion potentials in the car. We describe findings related to inappropriate behavior, past behavior changes, and persuasion for passengers. Our study is a qualitative approach to inform the design of innovative persuasive interfaces in the automotive domain. We present the setup and results of the probing study including a discussion of its potentials and limitations.

How Will Software Engineers of the Internet of Things Reason about Trust

The Internet of Things (IoT) will consist of everyday physical objects communicating with each other via massively distributed service-oriented architectures (SOAs). One neglected area of research is how engineers developing software underlying the IoT will decide whether the services they use and compose are trustworthy. We sketch how a formal socio-cognitive theory of trust can guide empirical research on the topic, and report preliminary results from 25 engineers who were asked how they currently reason about software component trustworthiness.

Trust in Automated Vehicles

Abstract Increasing degrees of automation in on-road vehicles bear great potential for heightened driver safety and traffic efficiency in both the near and far future. The more the driver delegates control to the vehicle, the more salient the issue of trust in automated technology becomes. Misaligned trust can lead to mishandling of automation controls in individual instances and decreases the general acceptance of on-road automation on a broader scale. In this paper, we apply insights from trust research for dynamic web service interaction to the novel automated driving domain, in order to scope the problem space regarding trust in automated vehicles. We conclude that the appropriate communication of trustworthiness, the necessity to calibrate trust, the importance of intervention capabilities by the driver, and the unambiguous transparency of locus of control are all important aspects when in comes to understanding trust in automated vehicles.

Control Transition Interfaces in Semiautonomous Vehicles: A Categorization Framework and Literature Analysis

Designing safe and effective systems for control transitions between human and vehicle is a difficult task, due to increased reaction times and potentially inattentive drivers. In order to respond to these difficulties, this paper presents an overview of interaction solutions for control transitions between manual and autonomous driving modes. The paper examines technology patents, as well as academic publications. The papers first contribution is an examination of the current state of the art of control transition interfaces in automated vehicles. The papers second contribution is the reusable categorization framework developed for this overview. The results are used to identify holes and potentials regarding control transition design, including strong focus on the system over the human, lacking fallback performance, and the potentials of effective driving mode communication. These aspects point the way towards the challenges to be solved -- together with how they might be solved -- for safe and effective control transitions.

You Never Forget How to Drive: Driver Skilling and Deskilling in the Advent of Autonomous Vehicles

In the scope of autonomous driving, the question arises if the increased use of automated systems will have an impact on drivers skills in handling the car in the long term. In order to gain more insights on the issue of driver deskilling and how it relates to driving experience and time intervals of non-driving, we conducted an online survey (n=703) considering three driver groups. We found that initial skilling is more of an issue than deskilling after long periods of driving inactivity, i.e., while once learned driving skills seem to remain stable after longer periods of non-driving, they are much more influenced by driving experience in terms of annual mileage and frequency of use. Applied to the autonomous context, this means that drivers must be trained to a high enough skill level or require sufficient manual driving experience, in order to be able to react properly when driving themselves.

Exploring children's 3DTV experience

3D is expected to transition from cinema to personal consumer electronics. Given that children are heavy users of consumer electronics and represent a driving force when it comes to the adoption of new technologies, it is important to investigate and understand childrens experiences with new technologies. Within this paper, we explore childrens 3DTV experience with respect to attributed viewing qualities, willingness to view 3DTV at home and influences by age and gender. The study was conducted as part of a three-day science event organized within a shopping mall. Within these three days, feedback from more than 600 children was collected using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. Next to a one-page, pre-structured questionnaire, which was developed in particular to explore the quality of childrens 3DTV viewing experience, we used open feedback cards on which the children could note their positive and negative experiences of watching 3DTV. The questionnaire results indicated that older children found watching 3DTV requires higher attention and is more exhausting, although -- at the same time -- they experienced it as more realistic than the younger children. Furthermore, three-fourths of the children indicated that they would like to watch 3DTV at home. The study results provide a first step towards a richer understanding of childrens experience with 3DTV.