Early Take-Over Preparation in Stereoscopic 3D

Situation awareness in highly automated vehicles can help the driver to get back in the loop during a take-over request (TOR). We propose to present the driver a detailed digital representation of situations causing a TOR via a scaled down digital twin of the highway inside the car. The digital twin virtualizes real time traffic information and is displayed before the actual TOR. In the car cockpit an augmented reality headset or a Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) interface can realize the augmentation. As today's hardware has technical limitations, we build an HMD based mock-up. We conducted a user study (N=20) to assess the driver behavior during a TOR. We found that workload decreases and steering performance raise significantly with the proposed system. We argue that the augmentation of the surrounding world in the car helps to improve performance during TOR due to better awareness of the upcoming situation.