Evaluation of Different ADAS Features in Vehicle Displays 2019-01-1006

With ever-rising automotive safety standards, automotive manufacturers have been pushing towards improving occupant safety and convenience by adding sophistication to vehicles using ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems). Recent developments in the industry have been towards adding additional display systems to work in collaboration with the aforementioned ADAS systems to educate the passengers on vehicle status and information. The current study presents the results of an experiment on driver performance including reaction time, eye-attention movement, mental workload, and subjective preference when different features of ADAS warnings (Forward Collision Warning) are displayed, including different locations (HDD (Head-Down Display) vs HUD (Head-Up Display)), modality of warning (text vs. pictographic), and a new concept that provides a dynamic birds eye view for warnings. Sixteen normal drivers drove a high-fidelity driving simulator integrated with display prototypes of the features. A full factorial between subject design was employed in the experiment. Independent variables were displayed as modality, location, and adjustability of the warnings with driver performance as the dependent variable including driver reaction time to the warning, EORT (Eyes-Off-Road-Time) during braking after receiving the warning, workload and subject preference. The primary results were in line with previous research, validating previous claims of the superiority of HUD over HDD in warning delivery. It was also found that the Text format of the warning yielded higher response rates along with lower workload, while most participants preferred the newly proposed dynamic bird’s eye view layout.