Affective driver-pedestrian interaction: Exploring driver affective responses toward pedestrian crossing actions using camera and physiological sensors

Eliciting and capturing drivers' affective responses in a realistic outdoor setting with pedestrians poses a challenge when designing in-vehicle, empathic interfaces. To address this, we designed a controlled, outdoor car driving circuit where drivers (N=27) drove and encountered pedestrian confederates who performed non-verbal positive or non-positive road crossing actions towards them. Our findings reveal that drivers reported higher valence upon observing positive, non-verbal crossing actions, and higher arousal upon observing non-positive crossing actions. Drivers' heart signals (BVP, IBI and BPM), skin conductance and facial expressions (brow lowering, eyelid tightening, nose wrinkling, and lip stretching) all varied significantly when observing positive and non-positive actions. Our car driving study, by drawing on realistic driving conditions, further contributes to the development of in-vehicle empathic interfaces that leverage behavioural and physiological sensing. Through automatic inference of driver affect resulting from pedestrian actions, our work can enable novel empathic interfaces for supporting driver emotion self-regulation

From video to hybrid simulator: Exploring affective responses toward non-verbal pedestrian crossing actions using camera and physiological sensors

Capturing drivers’ affective responses given driving context and driver-pedestrian interactions remains a challenge for designing in-vehicle, empathic interfaces. To address this, we conducted two lab-based studies using camera and physiological sensors. Our first study collected participants’ (N = 21) emotion self-reports and physiological signals (including facial temperatures) toward non-verbal, pedestrian crossing videos from the Joint Attention for Autonomous Driving dataset. Our second study increased realism by employing a hybrid driving simulator setup to capture participants’ affective responses (N = 24) toward enacted, non-verbal pedestrian crossing actions. Key findings showed: (a) non-positive actions in videos elicited higher arousal ratings, whereas different in-video pedestrian crossing actions significantly influenced participants’ physiological signals. (b) Non-verbal pedestrian interactions in the hybrid simulator setup significantly influenced participants’ facial expressions, but not their physiological signals. We contribute to the development of in-vehicle empathic interfaces that draw on behavioral and physiological sensing to in-situ infer driver affective responses during non-verbal pedestrian interactions

A novel production workflow and toolset for opera co-creation towards enhanced societal inclusion of people

Opera uses all the visual and performing arts to create extraordinary worlds of passion and sensibility. It is rightly recognised as a great achievement of European culture. And yet a form that once inspired social and artistic revolutions is often seen as the staid preserve of the elite. With rising inequality and social exclusion, many see opera—if they think of it at all—as symbolic of what is wrong in Europe today. This paper presents the technological and scientific approach of the European H2020 TRACTION project that aims to use opera as a path for social and cultural inclusion, making it once again a force for radical transformation. TRACTION wants to define new forms of artistic creation through which the most marginalised groups (e.g. migrants, the rural poor, young offenders and others) can work with artists to tell the stories that matter now. By combining best practices in participatory art with media technology’s innovations of language, form and process, the project is defining new approaches to co-creation and innovation, exploring novel audiovisual formats based in European cultural heritage, such as opera

Bioethics, the Surviving Sepsis Campaign and the industry.

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