See What I See: An Attention-Guiding eHMI Approach for Autonomous Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper introduces AGeHMI, an attention-guiding external interface for autonomous vehicles that improves pedestrian awareness of hazards, reduces collision risk, and enhances user confidence through a VR-based evaluation.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel projection-based eHMI design that actively guides pedestrian attention and addresses limitations of existing passive signals.

Findings

AGeHMI effectively guides pedestrian attention.

Reduces potential collision risks.

Improves subjective confidence and reduces cognitive workload.

Abstract

As autonomous vehicles are gradually being deployed in the real world, external Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) are expected to serve as a critical solution for enhancing vehicle-pedestrian communication. However, existing eHMI designs typically focus solely on the ego vehicle's status, which can inadvertently capture pedestrians' attention or encourage misguided reliance on the AV's signals, leading them to neglect scanning for other surrounding hazards. To address this, we propose the Attention-Guiding eHMI (AGeHMI), a projection-based visualization that employs directional cues and risk-based color coding to actively guide pedestrians' attention toward potential environmental dangers. Evaluation through a virtual reality user study (N = 20) suggests that AGeHMI effectively influences participants' visual attention distribution and significantly reduces potential collision risks with surrounding vehicles, while simultaneously improving subjective confidence and reducing cognitive workload.