The adoption of self-driving technologies requires addressing public concerns about their reliability and trustworthiness. To understand how user experience in self-driving vehicles is influenced by the level of risk and head-up display (HUD) information, using virtual reality (VR) and a motion simulator, we simulated risky situations including accidents with HUD information provided under different conditions. The findings revealed how HUD information related to the immediate environment and the accident’s severity influenced the user experience (UX). Further, we investigated galvanic skin response (GSR) and self-reported emotion (Valence and Arousal) annotation data and analyzed correlations between them. The results indicate significant differences and correlations between GSR data and self-reported annotation data depending on the level of risk and whether or not information was provisioned through HUD. Hence, VR simulations combined with motion platforms can be used to observe the UX (trust, perceived safety, situation awareness, immersion and presence, and reaction to events) of self-driving vehicles while controlling the road conditions such as risky situations. Our results indicate that HUD information provision significantly increases trust and situation awareness of the users, thus improving the user experience in self-driving vehicles.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) enable drivers to devote their primary attention to non-driving-related tasks (NDRTs). Consequently, AVs must provide intelligibility services appropriate to drivers’ in-situ states and in-car activities to ensure driver safety, and accounting for the type of NDRT being performed can result in higher intelligibility. We discovered that sleeping is drivers’ most preferred NDRT, and this could also result in a critical scenario when a take-over request (TOR) occurs. In this study, we designed TOR situations where drivers are woken from sleep in a high-fidelity AV simulator with motion systems, aiming to examine how drivers react to a TOR provided with our experimental conditions. We investigated how driving performance, perceived task workload, AV acceptance, and physiological responses in a TOR vary according to two factors: (1) feedforward timings and (2) presentation modalities. The results showed that when awakened by a TOR alert delivered >10 s prior to an event, drivers were more focused on the driving context and were unlikely to be influenced by TOR modality, whereas TOR alerts delivered <5 s prior needed a visual accompaniment to quickly inform drivers of on-road situations. This study furthers understanding of how a driver’s cognitive and physical demands interact with TOR situations at the moment of waking from sleep and designs effective interventions for intelligibility services to best comply with safety and driver experience in AVs.

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