A Play of Brilliants

Project Timeline: 2021.9 - 2022.2

Project goal

Transparent and empathetic companionship

At Didi, our mission is to bring joy to every journey. We aim to create long-term partnerships between customers and their vehicles, bringing them the joy of driving and prioritizing safety. Our smart EV is an intelligent and empathetic companion - bonding with users through transparent communication and emotionally supportive experiences.

Light, as a medium of interaction

In 'A Play of Brilliants', I introduce light to the dialogue - the dynamic exchange of information between humans and cars. I addresses transparency and empathy through three key aspects: language, intention, and emotion.

Language

The ‘Face’ of a Car

According to Windhager et al. (2008), people tend to perceive car fronts as having facial features and consistently attribute personality traits to them based on their shape, paralleling the perception of human faces. Car traits varied mainly along dimensions of 'power', such as maturity, and 'sociability', such as happiness.

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I designed a unique 'language' for the vehicle’s front lighting, enabling it to simulate facial expressions. This leverages people’s natural ability to recognize facial cues, allowing the car to convey emotions and be perceived as a companion.

Balance between expressiveness and road safety

I carefully balance the expressiveness of anthropomorphic design with the critical requirements of legislation and safety. Main consideration is 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.

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Intention

I designed the car to project subtle visual cues that communicate its intentions.

Pedestrian Safety

Rasouli (2018) noted that the lack of social understanding and effective communication can contribute to traffic conflicts and accidents involving pedestrians.

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Emotion

Imagine driving along a coastal road at sunset. The car’s interior lighting seamlessly adapts to the dimming environment. The mixed reality projector overlays the windshield with the sunset and clouds, bringing you the feeling of ‘open-air’ even while sitting inside.

The design prioritizes principles from ‘Calm Technology’ - being unobtrusive and adaptive. A combined algorithm, based on environmental lighting, mood, and user preferences, will determine the activation of projectors and LEDs, making the interior environment anticipate needs and be emotionally engaging.

The spatial arrangement of LEDs is designed with reference to theater lighting.

Calm Technology

Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown introduced the concept of ‘calm technology’ (1996), refers to an approach to design technology to be unobtrusive, minimally disruptive and seamlessly integrated into user’s environment.

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Theater Lighting

Palmer (2013) studied how lighting draws the audience's gaze, evokes responses, and elevates storytelling through colors, areas of spotlights, and shadows.

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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.