AutoVis: Enabling Mixed-Immersive Analysis of Automotive User Interface Interaction Studies

TL;DR

AutoVis is a novel mixed-immersive tool that combines desktop and virtual reality environments to facilitate complex analysis of automotive user interfaces and driver behavior in dynamic contexts.

Contribution

It introduces AutoVis, the first tool enabling mixed-immersive analysis of AUIs, integrating domain-specific visualizations and supporting comprehensive behavioral and environmental data analysis.

Findings

AutoVis effectively supports analysis of passenger behavior and vehicle interactions.

The tool facilitates insights into driver physiology and spatial interactions.

Validation shows AutoVis improves understanding of complex automotive data.

Abstract

Automotive user interface (AUI) evaluation becomes increasingly complex due to novel interaction modalities, driving automation, heterogeneous data, and dynamic environmental contexts. Immersive analytics may enable efficient explorations of the resulting multilayered interplay between humans, vehicles, and the environment. However, no such tool exists for the automotive domain. With AutoVis, we address this gap by combining a non-immersive desktop with a virtual reality view enabling mixed-immersive analysis of AUIs. We identify design requirements based on an analysis of AUI research and domain expert interviews (N=5). AutoVis supports analyzing passenger behavior, physiology, spatial interaction, and events in a replicated study environment using avatars, trajectories, and heatmaps. We apply context portals and driving-path events as automotive-specific visualizations. To validate AutoVis against real-world analysis tasks, we implemented a prototype, conducted heuristic walkthroughs using authentic data from a case study and public datasets, and leveraged a real vehicle in the analysis process.