To Walk or Not to Walk: Crowdsourced Assessment of External Vehicle-to-Pedestrian Displays

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable online methodology for assessing vehicle-to-pedestrian display concepts, enabling rapid, large-scale evaluation of design variations to improve communication of vehicle intent.

Contribution

The study introduces a new online testing approach using Amazon Mechanical Turk for evaluating vehicle-to-pedestrian displays, demonstrating its efficiency and scalability for early-stage design assessment.

Findings

Successfully evaluated 30 display concepts with 200 participants.

Methodology is scalable for large numbers of design variations.

Enables faster, more in-depth refinement of vehicle-to-pedestrian communication designs.

Abstract

Researchers, technology reviewers, and governmental agencies have expressed concern that automation may necessitate the introduction of added displays to indicate vehicle intent in vehicle-to-pedestrian interactions. An automated online methodology for obtaining communication intent perceptions for 30 external vehicle-to-pedestrian display concepts was implemented and tested using Amazon Mechanic Turk. Data from 200 qualified participants was quickly obtained and processed. In addition to producing a useful early-stage evaluation of these specific design concepts, the test demonstrated that the methodology is scalable so that a large number of design elements or minor variations can be assessed through a series of runs even on much larger samples in a matter of hours. Using this approach, designers should be able to refine concepts both more quickly and in more depth than available development resources typically allow. Some concerns and questions about common assumptions related to the implementation of vehicle-to-pedestrian displays are posed.