How Should Automated Vehicles Communicate Critical Situations?

Abstract

Passengers of automated vehicles will likely engage in non-driving related activities like reading and, therefore, be disengaged from the driving task. However, especially in critical situations such as unexpected pedestrian crossings, it can be assumed that passengers request information about the vehicle's intention and an explanation. Some concepts were proposed for such communication from the automated vehicle to the passenger. However, results are not comparable due to varying information content and scenarios. We present a comparative study in Virtual Reality (N=20) of four visualization concepts and a baseline with Augmented Reality, a Head-Up Display, or Lightbands. We found that all concepts were rated reasonable and necessary and increased trust, perceived safety, perceived intelligence, and acceptance compared to no visualization. However, when visualizations were compared, there were hardly any significant differences between them.