StickyWSD: Investigating Content Positioning on a Windshield Display for Automated Driving

Windshield displays (WSDs) are a promising new technology to augment the entire windscreen with additional information about vehicle state, highlight critical objects in the surrounding, or use the screen as replacement for a conventional display. Typically, augmentation is provided in a screen-fixed manner as overlay on the windscreen. However, it is unclear to date if this is optimal in terms of usability/UX and further there is no golden standard suggesting where to place and how to manage content on such large displays in a vehicular environment. In this work, we propose "StickyWSD"-a world-fixed positioning strategy-and evaluate its impact on quantitative and qualitative measures compared to screen-fixed positioning. Results from a user study conducted in a virtual reality driving simulator (N = 23) suggest that the dynamic world-fixed positioning technique shows increased task performance and lowered error rates as well as faster take-over times. Subjective evaluations show no clear preferences between both conditions. We propose to display text content on the WSD in world-fixed modality but further studies on context-and content-awareness are required.