Trends towards autonomous driving

Many drivers spend a reasonable time each day in their car - for commuting, shopping, and traveling. As most drivers spend this time alone, they demand ever-wider entertainment options and an almost living room-like environment for their vehicles. This underlines the need to enhance the emotional attachment between driver and car. Interaction design with an eye towards usability can help to foster this attachment. Furthermore, societal and IT trends are resulting in an always-connected environment in which drivers and passengers demand constant access to information and communication and in which vehicles have to be aware of their surroundings. Adding to this challenge are upcoming systems for (semi-) automated driving as well as the increased prevalence of car-sharing and a higher need for information when using electric cars.
The traditional automotive research has mainly focused on a primary task (i.e., driving) and directly related constructs, such as performance and workload. The secondary tasks have been treated as a concept of distraction. Given the rapidly increasing interests in "pleasant experiences in vehicle" (e.g., [1]) and "autonomous vehicles" nowadays, researchers need to enlarge the scope of automotive research with alternative interaction concepts and interactive systems to enable accomplishing secondary tasks and even tertiary tasks at reduced levels of workload.

1) Social cars

Vehicles are being connected to and communicating with each other [2] and a driving concept has evolved from an individual task into a collaborative task with an in-vehicle agent [4] or passengers [3]. In this social car context, a large portion of the primary task is being transferred to the in-vehicle system, which allows a driver to have more resources to be allocated to non-driving tasks. Consequently, a way of communication between a driver and a car or a driver/car and other drivers/cars has radically changed. This has brought about a new conceptualization about an ecosystem of the vehicle journey with expanding attention not only to a driver, but also to passengers in a passenger seat and back seat, which yields a number of novel research domains, such as natural user interface, peripheral interaction, and even gamification in the vehicle context.

2) Natural user interfaces

The introduction of new consumer devices like smart phones, tablets, and game consoles has brought with it new ways of interacting with computers and embedded devices. Within HCI research, "natural user interfaces" (NUIs) [7] have become a fruitful research topic encompassing multi-touch and full body gestures, conversational dialogs and affective systems, among many others. Inspired by the success of technologies like Kinect, Leap Motion, and Siri, the question arises whether such techniques might also be suitable for automotive user interfaces. Gestural and multimodal interfaces are not yet broadly deployed. As they might have the potential to enhance the user experience. and facilitate the execution of secondary or tertiary tasks without increasing driver distraction, the integration of such interfaces is of particular interest (e.g., [8]). Designing experiences with these user interfaces can address and fulfill psychological needs of the user while interacting with the car (e.g., [9]). Moreover, further development of display technologies like glasses-free 3D, high resolution, shaped, or transparent displays offer new ways for visualizing interactive as well as informative content. So far, output technologies are less investigated in terms of natural user interfaces and especially inside the car.
Besides supporting interaction for the driver, suitable infotainment and entertainment functionalities are also of special interest for co-drivers and passengers on the backseat. Also, we must be concerned with how potential new interaction techniques are designed and evaluated. How can individual NUI technologies be used, and how might they be combined in new and interesting ways to foster the overall user experience?

3) Peripheral interaction

While the field of NUI searches for interfaces that are more natural and, thus, more easy to use, the upcoming field of peripheral interaction tries to enable users to use technologies in the periphery of their attention. Since peripheral interaction can be designed to get the user’s attention on different levels (e.g., by using the toolkit described in [6]), drivers can solve secondary or tertiary tasks without getting distracted from a primary task (in this case: driving). In a future, where a driver just has to monitor the autonomous vehicle, we may keep a driver informed on the car’s status in his/her periphery, while he/she is doing something else.