A Field Study on Pedestrians’ Thoughts toward a Car with Gazing Eyes

It is promising to apply eye-gaze techniques in designing an external human-machine interface (eHMI) for a self-driving car. We can find several prior "eye" studies; however, due to the difficulty of running a study in a real environment, prior research was often evaluated in a controlled VR environment. It is unclear how physical eyes on the car affect pedestrians’ thoughts in the real-world outdoor environment. To answer the question, we built and mounted a set of physical eyes of suitable size for a real car, drove the car in a public open space, activated the physical eyes, and performed the eye-gaze interaction with pedestrians without providing them any prior explanation. We administered a questionnaire to collect pedestrians’ thoughts and conducted a thematic (inductive) analysis. By comparing our findings to the previous results through a literature review, we highlighted the significance of physical implementation of the "eye concept" for future research.