Inattentional Blindness with Augmented Reality HUDS: An On-road Study

As the integration of augmented reality (AR) technology in head-up displays (HUDs) becomes more prevalent in vehicles, it is crucial to understand how to design and evaluate AR interfaces to ensure safety. With new AR displays capable of rendering images with larger field of views and at varying depths, the visual and cognitive separation between graphical and real-world visual stimuli will be increasingly more difficult to quantify as will drivers' ability to efficiently allocate visual attention between the two sets of stimuli. In this study, we present a user study that serves as a crucial first step in gaining insight into inattentional blindness while using AR in surface transportation, where understanding is currently limited. Our primary goal is to investigate how the visual demand of AR tasks influences drivers' ability to detect stimuli, and whether the nature of the stimuli itself plays a role in this effect. To address these questions, we designed an on-road user study aimed at producing a more realistic and ecologically valid understanding of the phenomenon. Our results show that drivers' ability to timely detect stimuli in the environment decreased as the AR task visual demand increased demonstrated by both detection performance and inattentional blindness metrics. Further, inattentional blindness caused by AR displays appears to be more prevalent within drivers' central field of view. We conclude by discussing implications towards a safety-centric evaluation framework for AR HUDs.