Summary: The advent of autonomous vehicles is both exciting and alarming. The success or failure of such systems will very much depend on how the driver-vehicle interaction: whether people have a good assessment of what the car perceives and is likely to do, and how they might respond to different situations. In the Stanford Automotive Interactions Lab, we are looking at how people will interact with vehicles in the future, particularly around shared control with automation, the emotional experience of automated driving, and opportunities of learning and adaptation. By using simulation technologies and techniques we can prototype and test interfaces to understand how best to design our future automobiles.

Bio: Wendy Ju is Executive Director for Interaction Design Research at Stanford’s Center for Design Research, and an Associate Professor in the Graduate Design Program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her research is primarily focused on the design of interactive devices, particularly human-robot interaction and autonomous car interfaces. She is the author of the book The Design of Implicit Interactions, which is available from Morgan and Claypool.