Patrice Reilhac

Motion Sickness in Automated Vehicles: The Elephant in the Room

Automation disuse and associated loss of automation benefits may occur if users of automated vehicles experience motion sickness. Compared to conventional vehicles, motion sickness will be of greater concern due to the absence of vehicle control and the anticipated engagement in non-driving tasks. Furthermore, future users are expected to be less tolerant to the occurrence of motion sickness in automated vehicles compared to other means of transport. The risk of motion sickness may be manageable if we understand underlying causes and design our vehicles and driver-vehicle interactions appropriately. Guided by three fundamental principles, an initial set of design considerations are provided reflecting the incorporation of basic perceptual mechanisms.

Thinking Intuitive Driving Automation

We move away from the engineering based paradigm of Automated Driving and the political target of Full Automation in order to focus on the need to facilitate end-users’ readiness to share driving with the vehicle. Intuitive Driving Automation facilitates the relationship between end-user and vehicle so as to enable a fluid, continuous exchange of agency between the two. Ceding control requires trust, and trust requires adequate and intuitive communication. This communicative, trusting relationship can be achieved by adding reciprocity into the concept of Human Machine Interface and thinking of it as a Human Robot Relationship. The humanizing of technology implicit in this new relationship will be a considerable step towards making Automated Driving possible. (Written in the style of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.)

Shifting Paradigms and Conceptual Frameworks for Automated Driving

This article takes seriously how discourses of automated driving shape the world we are designing and the public’s perception of it. The metaphors which organize our thought and scaffold our conceptual frameworks betray our point of view: legacy, engineering-based or user-centered. Valeo’s Intuitive Driving strategy centers on the user experience and therefore on the evolving relationship between user and technology. Relationships are built on trust. Automated Driving involves an evolution of agency in a high stakes context with new implications for trust generation. It also entails a shift which has a huge impact both on industry and user: from horsepower to data-power. This shift fundamentally alters the nature of the relationship between human and vehicle. In the design of this relationship anthropomorphism is a central issue. Building a trusting human-machine relationship in automated driving inevitably means dealing with social robotics and affective computing where anthropomorphism in technology has been explored for many years. But the specificity of the automatic driving moment must be attended to: this is the only robot with an interior private mobile space. This new being will need a specific behavior designed for it, and already, a new discourse to speak of it.

User Experience with Increasing Levels of Vehicle Automation: Overview of the Challenges and Opportunities as Vehicles Progress from Partial to High Automation

The long awaited arrival of automated driving technology has the automotive industry perched on the precipice of radical change when it comes to the design of vehicle interiors and user experience. Recently, much thinking and many vehicle concepts have been devoted to demonstrating how vehicle interiors might change when vehicles reach full automation, where a human driver is neither required nor in some cases, even allowed to control the vehicle. However, looking more near term across all global market segments, we will likely see an increasing number of vehicles with widely varying automation capabilities emerging simultaneously. Any system short of full automation will still require driver control in some set of situations, and some fully automated vehicles will still allow driver control when desired. While it is unlikely that the basic seating arrangement, steering wheel, and pedals will be radically altered in this emerging segment of partial to highly automated vehicles, it is quite clear that the overall user experience during automated driving will need to evolve. Drivers will not be content to hold the steering wheel and stare at the road waiting for what may be a very infrequent request to take-over driving. The chapter presents the research conducted to develop the Valeo Mobius® Intuitive Driving solution for providing an embedded digital experience, even in lower levels of automation, and all while still promoting both shorter transition response times and better transition quality when emergency situations call for a transition from automated to manual control.

Innovative lighting systems enhance road safety

In the last twenty years, significant progress has been made in the field of headlight technology. Today’s systems are making driving at night much safer. Future intelligent lighting systems, which make use of computer-aided image processing sensors, will bring further safety benefits. Automotive supplier Valeo is currently developing such lighting systems.

The Digital Driver of the Future—User Experience Research on Generation Z in Germany

Future vehicle drivers will use cars differently than today, since increasingly connected and automated cars will offer a totally new driving experience. Valeo tries to find out how a positive driving experience of tomorrow can look like, but the challenge is that users today are not always aware of what they will need, especially when it comes to situations they have never experienced before. This paper shows that it is not enough to ask people what they would want in their future cockpit in order to find out their possible needs. Instead, one needs to understand what might impact their way of driving such as their way of living in a digital age, commuting and communicating. Understanding the user experience of users being born and raised in a digital era and being part of a generation highly-connected such as the Generation Z will help to create intuitive vehicle cockpits for automated and connected cars. With this background, a UX research study of Generation Z was conducted including ethnographic research and classical qualitative market research methods, exposing the future digital driver’s needs.

Designing an Intuitive Driving Experience in a Digital World

As we approach the 135th anniversary of the automobile, two industry trends, automation and digitalization, are rapidly revolutionizing the thus far, relatively unchanged automotive user experience. This paper describes the development of the Valeo MyMobius user interface concept. The goal of this project was to explore how to achieve an intuitive driving experience as the automotive industry undergoes transition from primarily analog to primarily digital interfaces and from physical buttons to multimodal interactions. To achieve the perception of intuitiveness, designers must understand their users, find and reduce physical and cognitive friction points, and bridge knowledge gaps with interface designs that facilitate discovery and learnability. The Valeo MyMobius concept featured steering wheel touch displays that supported quick, frequent menu selections using swiping gestures (common in smartphone interactions) and reinforcing icons (to facilitate learnability). Learning algorithms personalized the experience by tailoring suggestions, while more complex interactions were handled with a conversational voice assistant, which also served as a driving copilot, capable of contextually suggesting when Advanced Driving Assistance System (ADAS) features such as ACC could be utilized. The visual design aesthetic embodied Kenya Hara’s design philosophy of “Emptiness,” reducing visual clutter and creating spaces that are ready to receive inspiration and information. Altogether, the Valeo MyMobius concept demonstrated an attainable future where the perception of intuitiveness can be achieved with today’s technologies.

Innovative Lichtsysteme erhöhen die Verkehrssicherheit

Die Scheinwerfertechnik hat sich in den vergangenen zwei Jahrzehnten entscheidend weiterentwickelt. Moderne Systeme machen die nachtliche Fahrt bereits heute deutlich sicherer. Ein weiteres Plus an Sicherheit werden Beleuchtungssysteme liefern, die rechnergestutzt und mit bildverarbeitender Sensorik arbeiten. Der Zulieferer Valeo erarbeitet solche zukunftigen Beleuchtungssysteme.