A QoE Evaluation of an Immersive Virtual Reality Autonomous Driving Experience

The driver/passenger role in autonomous driving experiences is an important subject that is concerned with how these systems will interact and communicate with the human stakeholder. Even though self-driving technologies have made rapid progress in recent years, their success will depend on ethics, safe capabilities and user acceptance. The overall satisfaction resulting from the interaction between humans, these technologies and their evaluation in simulators can help industry to improve their design. Such evaluations can be based on user's perceived Quality of Experience (QoE). The impact of the quality features that compound VR environments is an important factor to understand. Sense of depth, texture quality and resolution are some examples that influence the perceived quality of the simulation and immersion levels. This demonstration promotes a VR autonomous driving experience in one street of Athlone, Ireland. The application will be presented in two different formats: photogrammetry, a technique that uses photos to provide realistic 3D content, and secondly non-photorealistic simulated environment. Further investigations will be carried out to understand factors that enable the highest immersive experience in autonomous vehicles considering feedback modalities between the car and its users.