Hype D-Live: XR Live Music System to Entertain Passengers for Anxiety Reduction in Autonomous Vehicles

• Main Authors: Akiyoshi, Takuto, Shimizu, Yuki, Takahama, Yusaku, Nagata, Koki, Sawabe, Taishi
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anxiety disorders; Behavioral sciences; Design methodology; Entertainment industry; Extended reality; Force; HCI design and evaluation methods; Human-centered computing; Interaction paradigms; Virtual reality; Visualization
• ISSN: 2473-0726
• DOI: 10.1109/ISMAR59233.2023.00029

Passengers in autonomous vehicles enjoy the comfort of being free from driving tasks, but they inevitably experience anxiety caused by autonomous vehicle stress (AVS). AVS encompasses vehicle behavior stress due to unpredictable acceleration, and external environmental stress due to potential collisions. Past research has explored approaches to improve passengers' comfort through behavior control and information presentation. However, methods that utilize stressful vehicle behavior in Extended Reality (XR) entertainment to distract from AVS-related anxiety are limited. Hence, the goal of this study was to maximize passenger comfort in automated vehicles. To achieve this goal, we implemented an XR entertainment system that utilizes vehicle behavior and evaluated its effect on reducing anxiety. In this study, we proposed "Hype D-Live", an XR live music system designed to reduce anxiety by providing multimodal visual, auditory, force, and vestibular stimuli using a hemispherical display and motion platform mounted on a vehicle. We developed system functions to adjust the force and vestibular senses according to the excitement level of the music and the direction of stressful acceleration and to reproduce moshing, a characteristic behavior at live music venues. However, we hypothesized that passengers might not fully enjoy the entertainment and could experience anxiety if the video content makes them aware of the external environment. Therefore, we conducted an experiment with a within-participant design, involving 24 participants (14 males and 10 females), comparing 3 types of video content for XR entertainment inside the autonomous vehicle: a real external environment, a virtual simulation of the external environment, and a virtual live music venue. The Wilcoxon signed rank test with the Bonferroni correction after the Friedman test revealed that, without the moshing function, the virtual live music venue video significantly enhanced enjoyment and reduced anxiety, compared to the real one.