The Deep Orange program is a concept vehicle development program focused on providing hands-on experience in design, engineering, prototyping and production planning as part of students’ two-year MS graduate education. Throughout this project, the team was challenged to create innovative concepts during the ideation phase as part of building the running vehicle. This paper describes the usability studies performed on two of the vehicle concepts that require driver interaction.
One concept is a human machine interface (HMI) that uses a holographic companion that can act as a concierge for all functions of the vehicle. After creating a prototype using existing technologies and developing a user interface controlled by hand gestures, a usability study was completed with older adults. The results suggest the input method was not intuitive. Participants demonstrated better performance with tasks using discrete hand motions in comparison to those that required continuous motions. The data were helpful to understand the challenges of untrained users interacting with a new HMI system.
The second concept is a parking assist system designed to help other drivers. A usability study evaluated the intuitiveness of the parking assist concept using a driving simulator. The results showed that all of the participants understood the purpose of the system without any explanation. The majority of the participants reported they would like to have this type of parking assist system on their own vehicle and would benefit from it while parking.
Future efforts should integrate the HMI’s companion with the parking assist system to increase distinctiveness and personalization. The goal of the companion is to not only act as a concierge, but to give additional information to external traffic as well.
The usability testing process helped the engineering students understand the end users’ perspective and what changes are needed to incorporate into future vehicles.