A Novel Cooperation-Guided Warning of Invisible Danger from AR-HUD to Enhance Driver’s Perception

Augmented Reality (AR) has the potential to help drivers become aware of invisible hazards through an Augmented Reality Head-Up Display (AR-HUD). However, this issue is still underexplored. To address it, a novel warning system for invisible dangers in AR-HUD user interfaces has been designed as a carrier for agents' cognitive information to enhance driver perception. This design was created by using a team cooperation perception model that combined the perception cycle of a human driver with a computational agent. Furthermore, user experiments were conducted to investigate the impact of this design on safe driving in two typical scenarios. The experimental results showed that this design can significantly improve drivers’ situation awareness and reaction time in both human-driving and auto-pilot modes, and enhance human drivers' trust in the auto-pilot system. The model and design can be generalized to more AR-HUD scenarios requiring human-machine perception and cognitive cooperation.