This year’s International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications took place from 1st – 3rd September in Nottingham, England, and attracted around 280 attendees from research and industry from all over the world. Sandra Trösterer, Ilhan Aslan, Thomas Grah, Alexander Meschtscherjakov, and Manfred Tscheligi attended the conference and presented work from the Center for Human-Computer Interaction in several talks and poster presentations.

Ilhan Aslan gave a talk on „A Leap for Touch: Proximity Sensitive Touch Targets in Cars“ (co-authored by Alina Krischkowsky, Alexander Meschtscherjakov, Martin Wuchse, and Manfred Tscheligi). He provided insights on the design space of touch screen technology combined with mid-air gestures and its high potential to improve interaction with touch interfaces in cars.

Alexander Meschtscherjakov gave a talk on “ChaseLight: Ambient LED Stripes to Control Driving Speed” (co-authored by Christine Döttlinger, Christina Rödel and Manfred Tscheligi), in which he showcased an LED-based persuasive system, which changes the perceived driving speed and was evaluated in a study in the driving simulator. He further presented the paper “Co-Navigator: An Advanced Navigation System for Front-Seat Passengers” on behalf of Nicole Perterer, (co-authored by Alexander Meschtscherjakov and Manfred Tscheligi), thereby providing insights on the Co-Navigator prototype, its elements, and an explorative in-situ evaluation of a navigation system specifically designed to foster the potential of a co-driver interacting with the driver for navigation.

Also, Sandra Trösterer presented her paper “Light My Way: Visualizing Shared Gaze in the Car“ (co-authored by Martin Wuchse, Christine Döttlinger, Alexander Meschtscherjakov and Manfred Tscheligi), providing insights on how to allow the co-driver to help the driver during a navigational task by sharing his/her gaze using two visual modalities. Furthermore, she presented a poster on “LCTNav: A Method for Investigating Collaborative Navigation” (co-authored by Martin Wuchse, Axel Baumgartner, Bernhard Maurer, Magdalena Gärtner, Alexander Meschtscherjakov and Manfred Tscheligi), in which she provided details about the ongoing work on a method for investigating collaborative navigation in the driving simulator.

Thomas Grah presented “Dorsal Haptic Display: A Shape-changing Car Seat for Sensory Augmentation of Rear Obstacles” (co-authored by Felix Epp, Martin Wuchse, Alexander Meschtscherjakov, Frank Gabler, Arnd Steinmetz and Manfred Tscheligi) as a poster. It showed the potential of shape-changing interfaces for haptic sensory augmentation in the car domain. The developed shape-changing car seat backrest lets the driver haptically sense obstacles in the rear periphery. The poster was nominated second place for the “best poster award” from 48 posters by the conference’s attendees.

Alexander Meschtscherjakov further presented the poster “MaDSAV: Maintaining Driving Skills in Semi-Autonomous Vehicles” which showed the current state of the recently started project in cooperation with the University of Luxembourg.

He also presented several works that have been developed by students within different teaching courses:

“Advanced Traffic Light Interface: Countdown Timers to Increase User Experience” (Andreas Frank, Fabian Schneider, Alexander Meschtscherjakov and Julian Stadon), which granted insights on how to improve user experience of drivers using LED based traffic light as displays.

“LED-A-pillars: Displaying Distance Information on the Cars Chassis” (Alexander Meschtscherjakov, Lukas Wanko and Fabio Batz). Different LED-visualizations for overcoming the A-pillar blind spot were evaluated in this work.

“Adaptive Digital Sunshade: Blocking the Sun From Blinding the Driver” (Alexander Meschtscherjakov, Nino Marcel Kratzer, Hubert Scharfetter, Julian Stadon and Stefan Paul Kernjak), which provided insights on the design of different shaped digital sunshades, which where evaluated in the driving simulator using a projector to simulate sun and sunshades.

During the poster sessions, also the paper „Everyday Commuting: Prediction, Actual Experience and Recall of Anger and Frustration in the Car“ (by Daniela Wurhofer, Alina Krischkowsky, Marianna Obrist, Evangelos Karapanos, Evangelos Niforatos, Manfred Tscheligi) was presented by Evangelos Niforatos from Università della Svizzera italiana Lugano, Switzerland. This work provides insights on driver’s User Experience (UX) in terms of systematically investigating predicted experience, actual experience, and recalled experience. Evangelos further presented “eMotion: Retrospective In-Car User Experience Evaluation” (co-authored by Evangelos Karapanos, Marc Langheinrich, Daniela Wurhofer, Alina Krischkowsky, Marianna Obrist and Manfred Tscheligi), a mobile application that provides a lightweight alternative to Experience Sampling for application while driving.

In addition, Alexander and Manfred Tscheligi organized the “3rd Workshop on User Experience of Autonomous Driving” together with Dalila Szostak, Rabindra Ratan, Rod McCall, Ioannis Politis, Sven Krome, Andreas Riener, Myounghoon “Philart” Jeon and Jacques Terken. This workshop was the third in the series that started 2013. The objective of the workshop was to identify challenges in societal acceptance for Autonomous Driving and develop a ten-point plan of research goals in order to improve UX in Autonomous Driving. The workshop focused on the areas of methodological issues, human factors, entertainment, social driving, and novel user interface approaches.