Human or robot? Exploring different avatar appearances to increase perceived security in shared automated vehicles

Shared Automated Vehicles (SAVs) promise to make automated mobility accessible to a wide range of people while reducing air pollution and improving traffic flow. In the future, these vehicles will operate with no human driver on board, which poses several challenges that might differ depending on th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal on multimodal user interfaces 2024, Vol.18 (2-3), p.209-228
Main Authors: Schuß, Martina, Pizzoni, Luca, Riener, Andreas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Automation
Avatars
Computer Science
Image Processing and Computer Vision
Original Paper
Robots
Security
Signal,Image and Speech Processing
User experience
User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction
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Summary:Shared Automated Vehicles (SAVs) promise to make automated mobility accessible to a wide range of people while reducing air pollution and improving traffic flow. In the future, these vehicles will operate with no human driver on board, which poses several challenges that might differ depending on the cultural context and make one-fits-all solutions demanding. A promising substitute for the driver could be Digital Companions (DCs), i.e. conversational agents presented on a screen inside the vehicles. We conducted interviews with Colombian participants and workshops with German and Korean participants and derived two design concepts of DCs as an alternative for the human driver on SAVs: a human-like and a robot-like. We compared these two concepts to a baseline without companion using a scenario-based online questionnaire with participants from Colombia (N = 57), Germany (N = 50), and Korea (N = 29) measuring anxiety, security, trust, risk, control, threat, and user experience. In comparison with the baseline, both DCs are statistically significantly perceived as more positively. While we found a preference for the human-like DC among all participants, this preference is higher among Colombians while Koreans show the highest openness towards the robot-like DC.
ISSN:1783-7677
1783-8738
DOI:10.1007/s12193-024-00436-x