How Communicating Features can Help Pedestrian Safety in the Presence of Self-Driving Vehicles: Virtual Reality Experiment

Virtual reality (VR) has proven to be a useful tool for conducting human factors research in interface design. With the development and promotion of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, researchers are focusing on designing different types of interfaces to induce trust in road users toward this new technology. In this article, VR is used to investigate pedestrians’ understanding of proposed designs for external features on AVs. We are also interested in investigating how the presence of an operator inside the vehicle influences pedestrians’ preference for features. VR headset tracking, survey-based responses, and video-recorded body movements are used to collect data on pedestrian responses to three operator statuses and seven feature types. Pedestrians prefer both “walk” in text and verbal message saying safe to cross as clear and comforting features on an AV. They perceive the distracted operator condition as to be an inconvenient situation even for the AV equipped with visual or audible features. Older people find the features more helpful and people with higher innovativeness rate the feature ideas with higher ratings.