Information Presentation Strategies to Promote Pedestrian Behavior Change in Mixed Spaces with Automated Vehicle

This paper introduces an information presentation strategy for pedestrians, aiming to enhance traffic efficiency in a mixed pedestrian-automated vehicle environment, such as a public road. While automated driving technology has made remarkable progress, interactions with pedestrians on regular roads have mostly been studied in virtual environments using virtual reality goggles. According to these studies, potential traffic efficiency and safety issues arise from pedestrians' limited understanding of automated vehicle behavior. To address this, we propose a human-machine interface employing a head-mounted display (HMD) to mitigate traffic efficiency degradation caused by pedestrians. The proposed system draws upon behavioral economics principles to encourage pedestrians to modify their behavior and develop better interactions with automated vehicles. Simulations were conducted to identify an information presentation strategy that strongly supports learning, and its effectiveness was further validated through experiments involving a real vehicle. Notably, the experimental results confirmed that the information presentation strategies proven effective in simulations also facilitated pedestrian learning during real-world interactions.