Designing Wearable Augmented Reality Concepts to Support Scalability in Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian Interaction

Wearable augmented reality (AR) offers new ways for supporting the interaction between autonomous vehicles (AVs) and pedestrians due to its ability to integrate timely and contextually relevant data into the user's field of view. This article presents novel wearable AR concepts that assist crossing pedestrians in multi-vehicle scenarios where several AVs frequent the road from both directions. Three concepts with different communication approaches for signaling responses from multiple AVs to a crossing request, as well as a conventional pedestrian push button, were simulated and tested within a virtual reality environment. The results showed that wearable AR is a promising way to reduce crossing pedestrians' cognitive load when the design offers both individual AV responses and a clear signal to cross. The willingness of pedestrians to adopt a wearable AR solution, however, is subject to different factors, including costs, data privacy, technical defects, liability risks, maintenance duties, and form factors. We further found that all participants favored sending a crossing request to AVs rather than waiting for the vehicles to detect their intentions—pointing to an important gap and opportunity in the current AV-pedestrian interaction literature.