MR Visualization of Wheel Trajectories of Driving Vehicle by Seeing-Through Dashboard

A lot of efforts aim to realize a society where autonomous vehicles become general transportation in industrial, political and academic fields. In order to make autonomous vehicles more familiar with the public, it is necessary to develop not only advanced auto driving control but also comfortable environments for the passengers. This paper proposes our trial to improve comfort of passengers on autonomous vehicles. We developed an experimental vehicle equipping Mixed Reality (MR) display system which aims to reduce anxiety using visual factors. Our proposed system visualizes a road surface that is out of the passenger's field of view by projecting the see-through image on the dashboard. Moreover, it overlays the computer graphics of the wheel trajectories on the displayed image using MR so that the passengers can easily confirm the auto driving control is working correctly. The displayed images enable passengers to comprehend the road condition and the expected vehicle route out of the passenger's field of view. We investigated change of the mental stress by introducing methods for measuring physiological indices, heart rate variability and sweat information.