ThermalDrive - Towards Situation Awareness over Thermal Feedback in Automated Driving Scenarios

Abstract

We present ThermalDrive, a thermal interface that provided situational awareness information using thermal feedback on the face of the driver. A prototype is built to simulate the autonomous driving and the thermal interface in virtual reality. We conduct an experiment to investigate the impact of displaying system situation awareness information via the thermal feedback in a VR driving simulation (16 participants). The initial results indicate that the thermal interface might be a suitable feedback mechanism to convey some information in autonomous driving. In particular, cold thermal feedback was effective in terms of notability and user preference.