Pedestrians in Nottingham have been fooled into seeing a driverless car - while the driver is disguised as a seat. The quirky experiment is described as the first ever UK ‘ghost driver’ study using visual displays to communicate with people crossing roads.
The University of Nottingham fitted a car with a screen communicating different things to pedestrians - including a happy face, a giving way message and even a raised eyebrow. Results found that, in the absence of someone in the driving seat, pedestrians trust certain visual prompts more than others when deciding whether to cross in front of an autonomous car.
The aim was to understand how pedestrians respond naturally to self-driving vehicles with different External Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) - visual displays positioned on the front of the vehicle. To do this, a car was driven around the university’s Park Campus over several days with a ‘ghost-driver’ concealed in the driver’s seat.
