Shared Gaze in the Car

Abstract

Many automotive tasks can potentially be seen as a collaborative activity between driver and front seat passenger. Nevertheless, the position of both passengers sitting in the front seat hinders a natural face to face communication. An assisting co-driver can thus lead to more distraction and misunderstanding because pointing out things becomes diffficult. We want to add a natural way of communication and present a prototype that captures the co-driver's gaze and visualizes it for the driver. With this setup we try to create a possibility for passengers to collaborate and share information e.g., during navigational tasks or to provide hints about upcoming hazards. We developed a prototype in a car simulator to explore the concept in a first explorative study setup. In this paper we describe our concept of using shared gaze in the car, the technical setup of the prototype as well as possible application scenarios and future studies.