A social experiment, a rather scary one, left pedestrians absolutely stunned when they saw a moving car without anyone in the driver’s seat.
Well, this is not what exactly happened. There was a person, but he was disguised as a car seat. The man was wearing a car seat costume, with a mesh fabric on top.
The study at Nottingham University aimed at finding how people would react to self-driving vehicles when it comes to road safety.
They used a “ghost driver” to carry out the study. A visual display was placed in front of the car, which read External Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs).
A report by UK-based The Engineer noted that researchers found that pedestrians rely on certain visual prompts more than others when deciding whether to cross in front of a car perceived as autonomous.
The car was driven around the university’s Park Campus over several days. At first glance, it looked like there was no one, the so-called “ghost-driver” was there in the driver’s seat.
The report mentioned that a series of different designs projected onto the eHMI informed pedestrians of the car’s behaviour and intention.
The person in the driver’s seat was David R Large, who is a senior research fellow with the Human Factors Research Group at the university.
As quoted by media reports, Large, said: “We wanted to explore how pedestrians would interact with a driverless car and developed this unique methodology to explore.”
Watch this video:
How pedestrians would interact with a driverless car
A team member, who was in the back seat, controlled the eHMI, while front and rear dash cam footage was collected to observe pedestrians’ reactions in real time.
The researchers were also placed at four crossing points to ask pedestrians to complete a short survey about their experience of the vehicle and its displays.
Large said in a statement: “As part of the ServCity project, which created a blueprint infrastructure for autonomous vehicles in the UK, we wanted to explore how pedestrians would interact with a driverless car and developed this unique methodology to explore their reactions.”
“We were keen to identify which designs invited the highest levels of trust by people wanting to cross the road. To do this we used three different levels of anthropomorphism; implicit, an LED strip designed to mimic an eye’s pupil, low, a vehicle-centric icon and words such as ‘giving way’, and explicit, an expressive face and human-like language,” he added.
According to the study, some indicators from the dashcam footage were used to evaluate pedestrians’ crossing behaviour. The researchers have observed how long it took people to cross, how long they looked at the car and the number of times they glanced and/or gestured at the vehicle.
The study helped the researchers to study in detail people’s attitudes and behaviour in response to the different eHMI displays, and autonomous vehicles.
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