ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour
This article is part of the Research TopicIntegrating Multidisciplinary Approaches to Mitigate Road Traffic Crashes and OutcomesView all 6 articles
Differences in Drivers' Dependence on AR Warning Information in Urban Driving Environments: The Role of Driving Experience
Provisionally accepted
- Faculty of Arts and Fashion, Kyiv National University of Technologies and Design, Kyiv, Ukraine
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AR HUDs can improve drivers' driving performance and driving safety, but with the in-depth study of the trust problem of automated driving, it has been found that excessive trust in automated systems can trigger automation complacency, which in turn brings about dependency problems. Therefore, the objectives of this study were: 1) to investigate the differences in the dependence on AR warning messages between drivers with different driving experiences during daytime and nighttime in urban areas; and 2) to propose an optimization strategy for the interaction design of AR warning messages based on the study findings. This study adopted a before-and-after comparative experimental task to analyze and compare driving dependence by examining drivers' perceived time to pedestrians running out (a typical urban road hazard) in the absence of AR warning messages and their perceived time to the hazard in the presence of a random AR failure in an AR warning message environment. The results showed that, objectively, the degree of dependence on AR warning messages for both experienced and novice drivers firstly depended on the driving environment; the higher the driving environment load (e.g., at night), the more the driver concentrated attention during driving and thus did not develop dependence. In an environment with a smaller driving load, dependence depended on the difference in driving experience: experienced drivers, due to their driving habits and subjective initiative, did not show dependence on AR warning messages, whereas novice drivers tended to relax vigilance, thus creating dependence. Subjectively, drivers' dependence and anticipation of AR warning messages depended on their evaluation of the AR warning system's intrusiveness rather than its effectiveness. The findings contribute to enhancing AR HUD interaction designs, with recommendations for future research to address other urban driving risks.
Keywords: AR warning messages, Trust Calibration, Technology dependence, driving experience, Hazard perception
Received: 31 May 2025; Accepted: 24 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Huo and Rubanka. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Faren Huo, huofaren@nbu.edu.cn
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