Designing External Automotive Displays: VR Prototypes and Analysis

Our work extends contemporary research into visualizations and related applications for automobiles. Focusing on external car bodies as a design space we introduce the External Automotive Displays (EADs), to provide visualizations that can share context and user-specific information as well as offer opportunities for direct and mediated interaction between users and automobiles. We conducted a design study with interaction designers to explore design opportunities on EADs to provide services to different road users; pedestrians, passengers, and drivers of other vehicles. Based on the design study, we prototyped four EADs in virtual reality (VR) to demonstrate the potential of our approach. This paper contributes our vision for EADs, the design and VR implementation of a few EAD prototypes, a preliminary design critique of the prototypes, and a discussion of the possible impact and future usage of external automotive displays.