Personal space of autonomous car's passengers sitting in the driver's\n seat

Abstract

This article deals with the specific context of an autonomous car navigating\nin an urban center within a shared space between pedestrians and cars. The\ndriver delegates the control to the autonomous system while remaining seated in\nthe driver's seat. The proposed study aims at giving a first insight into the\ndefinition of human perception of space applied to vehicles by testing the\nexistence of a personal space around the car.It aims at measuring proxemic\ninformation about the driver's comfort zone in such conditions.Proxemics, or\nhuman perception of space, has been largely explored when applied to humans or\nto robots, leading to the concept of personal space, but poorly when applied to\nvehicles. In this article, we highlight the existence and the characteristics\nof a zone of comfort around the car which is not correlated to the risk of a\ncollision between the car and other road users. Our experiment includes 19\nvolunteers using a virtual reality headset to look at 30 scenarios filmed in\n360{\\textdegree} from the point of view of a passenger sitting in the driver's\nseat of an autonomous car.They were asked to say "stop" when they felt\ndiscomfort visualizing the scenarios.As said, the scenarios voluntarily avoid\ncollision effect as we do not want to measure fear but discomfort.The scenarios\ninvolve one or three pedestrians walking past the car at different distances\nfrom the wings of the car, relative to the direction of motion of the car, on\nboth sides. The car is either static or moving straight forward at different\nspeeds.The results indicate the existence of a comfort zone around the car in\nwhich intrusion causes discomfort.The size of the comfort zone is sensitive\nneither to the side of the car where the pedestrian passes nor to the number of\npedestrians. In contrast, the feeling of discomfort is relative to the car's\nmotion (static or moving).Another outcome from this study is an illustration of\nthe usage of first person 360{\\textdegree} video and a virtual reality headset\nto evaluate feelings of a passenger within an autonomous car.\n