Smartwatch for a scalable pedestrian-AV interaction

Moos van der Bijl (2020) coached by Stijn Ossevoort

Description

In the near future, it will become impossible to make contact with a driver. In the upcoming years, automated vehicles with different levels of automation and mixed traffic will become reality.

There must be a new way of communication between AV’s and pedestrians. I looked at already existing designs of eHMI and saw that these are barely scalable.

Therefore I dove into the subject of scalable interaction between AV and pedestrian. Eventually I came up with the combination of eHMI and a smartwatch. I wanted to validate whether people even like the use of a smartwatch for such a scenario in the future. In order to validate the interface and the watch, I created different videos of other already existing eHMIs. Trying out what works and what doesn’t, by showing them separate eHMIs as well as combined.