Shared gaze while driving: How drivers can be supported by an LED-visualization of the front-seat passenger’s gaze

Abstract

The front-seat passenger in a vehicle may assist a driver in providing hints towards points of interest in a driving situation. In order to communicate spatial information efficiently, the so-called shared gaze approach has been introduced in previous research. Thereby, the gaze of the front-seat passenger is visualized for the driver. So far, this approach has been solely investigated in driving simulator environments. In this paper, we present a study on how well shared gaze works in a real driving situation (n = 8). We examine identification rates of different object types in the driving environment based on the visualization of the front-seat passenger’s gaze via glowing LEDs on an LED-strip. Our results show that this rate is dependent on object relevance for the driving task and movement of the object. We found that perceived visual distraction was low and that the usefulness of shared gaze for navigational tasks was considered high.