Towards Dynamic Positioning of Text Content on a Windshield Display for Automated Driving

Abstract

Windshield displays (WSDs) are a promising new technology to augment the entire windscreen with additional information about vehicle state, highlight critical objects in the surrounding, or serve as replacement for conventional displays. Typically, augmentation is provided in a screen-fixed manner as overlay on the windscreen. However, it is unclear to date if this is optimal in terms of usability/UX. In this work, we propose ”StickyWSD” – a world-fixed positioning strategy – and evaluate its impact on quantitative measures compared to screen-fixed positioning. Results from a user study conducted in a virtual reality driving simulator (N = 23) suggest that the dynamic world-fixed positioning technique shows increased performance and lowered error rates as well as take-over times. We conclude that the ”StickyWSD” approach offers lot of potential for WSDs that should be researched further.