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Ears Outside the Car: Evaluation of Binaural Vehicular Sounds and Visual Animations as Driver's Blind Spot Indicators

Published: 18 September 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Driving demands a significant amount of visual attention, which may impair drivers’ ability to detect and react to visual information such as blind spot warnings. This online pilot study (N = 242) evaluated the perception of binaural auditory cues and concurrent visual animations about overtaking vehicles designed to improve drivers’ situational awareness. The results showed that the spatial direction of the sounds was perceived in a high degree of precision, and they were rated as pleasant and natural sounding. Spatial congruency between the two information modalities was accurately perceived with visualizations rated as significantly more reliable blind spot indicators than sounds. The results suggest that spatial direction of binaural sounds can be consistently interpreted both alone and in tandem with visualizations in the given driving scenario. Binaural sounds could enhance drivers’ situational awareness in an eyes-free way to anticipate overtaking vehicles already before they trigger visual blind spot warnings.

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  1. Ears Outside the Car: Evaluation of Binaural Vehicular Sounds and Visual Animations as Driver's Blind Spot Indicators

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    AutomotiveUI '23 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications
    September 2023
    382 pages
    ISBN:9798400701122
    DOI:10.1145/3581961
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 18 September 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. Augmented reality
    2. Binaural stimulation
    3. Blind spot warning
    4. Lane change
    5. Situational awareness

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