Automotive eHMI Development in Virtual Reality: Lessons Learned from Current Studies

Kurzfassung

More and more studies in automotive research and development are conducting user-centered development in the emerging field of external human-machine interfaces (eHMI) in virtual reality (VR). As time, cost and risk are decreasing with progressively affordable sophisticated VR technologies, researchers have shifted to virtual testing. Within this context, they use a variety of methods and technologies to develop new designs but so far little examination has been done towards validity of virtualization and description of the technical setup. As level of immersion is one of the current pillars in VR and technology evolves rapidly, study setups differ a lot in recent years, resulting in poorer comparability. In this paper, our goal is to review the current generation of VR studies in automotive eHMI development and extract in the sense of a lessons-learned approach best practices with regard to their VR setup. For that, we assessed a total of six current studies published between 2017 and April 2020 in automotive eHMI development to extract lessons learned from study designs and virtualization setups. We took a look at hardware and software used as well as study procedure. The results allow us to find useful conclusions on automotive eHMI development practices in VR.