A Play of Brilliants
Project Timeline: 2021.05 - 2021.08
Team
Diane Liu (UX Designer)
Ruoxin Bai (UX Designer)
Hao Wang (3D Modeling Engineer)
Tools
Figma, Blender
After Effects
Unreal Engine 5
Unique challenges
Creating intuitive interactions with smart hardwares
Designers face a unique set of challenges when creating intuitive and empathetic experiences with smart hardwares. The challenges include:
- Rapidly evolving AI capabilities lead to varying levels of user acceptance and understanding, making effective communication and transparency in such tech challenging.
- Smart agents struggle to navigate through complexities in human emotions, making it difficult to create emotional resonance and truly understand human needs.
- Intelligent hardware is integrated into a wide range of real-world environments, demanding solutions that adapt to multiple scenarios.
Our goal
Transparent and empathetic companionship
At Didi, our mission is to bring joy to every journey. We aim to create strong and long-term partnerships between our customers and their vehicles, thus bringing the joy of driving while prioritizing safety and convenience. We introduce our smart EV as an intelligent and empathetic companion, which is not only transparent in communication, but also emotionally supportive.
Light, as a medium of HCI
In the project 'A Play of Brilliance', our team explores using light as a medium of human-computer interaction in smart EVs. We addressed key principles through 3 key features.
Language
We designed a unique 'language' for the vehicleâs front lighting, allowing them to mimic human facial expressions. This approach takes advantage of peopleâs natural ability to recognize and respond to facial cues, enabling the car to be perceived as a companion rather than just a machine.
The âFace of a Carâ
Sonja Windhager et al. (2012) investigated how people perceive car fronts as human-like faces.
They found that people consistently assign facial features to car fronts and that this influences their perception of the car's characteristics, such as friendliness or aggressiveness.
Balance between expressiveness and road safety
We carefully balance the expressiveness of anthropomorphic design with the critical requirements of legislation and safety. We take into consideration the different brightness levels, colors, spatial positions, and light-up patterns of each lighting component. For example, expressive lighting such as "crying" or "sorry" is restricted to stationary scenarios. Expressions like "charging", viewed by the owner from a near distance, are designed with components providing dimmed brightness. Expressions used for communicating with other drivers, such as "focus" or "sorry", are designed with simple light-up patterns to avoid interfering with the sliding pattern of the turn signal.
Intent Display - V2P
Current pedestrian to vehicle interactions rely heavily on attention (eye contact) and communication (car signaling). If either is missing, it puts pedestrians at a higher level of risk. We design subtle visual cues that are projected onto the road surface to communicate its intentions to pedestrians.
Intent Display
In virtual reality tests conducted by Chang found that the return of eye contact (attention) has shown to speed up pedestrian crossing decision time by 86%.
Studies have found that when autonomous vehicles display their intent, there is 38% improvement in resolving pedestrian and traffic standstills.
Emotional Interior Ambience
Imagine driving along a coastal road at sunset. You take a deep breath and enjoy the flow state of driving. The interior lighting adjusts itself to match the dimming environment. The mixed reality projector turns on, projecting the sunset and clouds onto the windshield, bringing you a fresh breeze even while sitting inside the car.
Our design prioritizes the principles of "Calm Technology". A combined algorithm based on environment, mood and user preferences will determine the activation of projectors and LEDs, make the interior environment anticipates needs and emotionally engaging.
Calm Technology
In 1996, Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown introduced the concept of âcalm technologyâ, refers to an approach to design technology to be unobtrusive, minimally disruptive and seamlessly integrated into userâs environment.
We carefully designed the spatial placement of LEDs and achieve the subtle and welcoming ambiance through utilizing diffused reflections of indirect lighting.
Reflection
This project about making cars more emotionally aware when interacting with pedestrians tackles some big issues. The main ideas of having the AI blend in, use subtle signals, build trust, and keep things simple for people are right on target for creating AI that feels helpful and human-friendly.
There are definitely some tricky parts to figure out too, like how to handle the switch to more self-driving cars on the road, tweaking the AI's communication for different kinds of people, and stopping jaywalking if people think the AI will always stop for them.
Testing this out in the real world will be key to improve the ideas. But overall, this project sets a great starting point for designing AI cars that can smoothly navigate around people and all our human quirks.