ARena: Augmented Reality Simulator for Automated Vehicle-Human Road User Interaction

Abstract

The advent of automated vehicles (AVs) prompted AutomotiveUI researchers to investigate how AVs can safely share the road with Human Road Users (HRUs). Researchers developed interfaces to facilitate AV-HRU interaction, e.g., on-vehicle eHMIs. However, these were mostly evaluated through online surveys with stationary participants, or virtual reality (VR) setups in small indoor settings, limiting ecological validity. This video submission showcases ARena, an open-source augmented reality (AR) simulator that projects life-sized virtual AVs, interfaces, and traffic infrastructure into outdoor environments, allowing participants to move freely. ARena enables the evaluation of diverse AV behaviours, including hazardous non-yielding scenarios that are unsafe to study using real vehicles. The platform logs key behavioural measures, including speed, cadence and gaze. ARena is extensible: Researchers can create custom traffic scenario scenes without changing logging or backend logic. The video shows how ARena supports realism for AV-HRU interaction research and advances the large-scale adoption of AVs