Augmenting the driver's view with realtime safety-related information

In the last couple of years, in-vehicle information systems have advanced in terms of design and technical sophistication. This trend manifests itself in the current evolution of navigation devices towards advanced 3D visualizations as well as real-time telematics services. We present important constituents for the design space of realistic visualizations in the car and introduce realization potentials in advanced vehicle-to-infrastructure application scenarios. To evaluate this design space, we conducted a driving simulator study, in which the in-car HMI was systematically manipulated with regard to its representation of the outside world. The results show that in the context of safety-related applications, realistic views provide higher perceived safety than with traditional visualization styles, despite their higher visual complexity. We also found that the more complex the safety recommendation the HMI has to communicate, the more drivers perceive a realistic visualization as a valuable support. In a comparative inquiry after the experiment, we found that egocentric and bird's eye perspectives are preferred to top-down perspectives for safety-related in-car safety information systems.