Passenger Anxiety About Virtual Driver Awareness During a Trip with a Virtual Autonomous Vehicle Alexandros Koilias 1 , Christos Mousas 2(B ) , Banafsheh Rekabdar 3 , and Christos-Nikolaos Anagnostopoulos 1 1 University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Greece {ctd17008,canag}@aegean.gr 2 Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA cmousas@purdue.edu 3 Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA brekabdar@cs.siu.edu Abstract. A virtual reality study concerning participants’ anxiety lev- els when immersed in a virtual reality interaction with an autonomous vehicle was conducted. Five conditions were tested. The examined con- ditions are based on awareness of the virtual character (driver). During the external awareness conditions the virtual character either focuses on the road traffic or does not. During the internal awareness conditions the virtual character either pays attention to the car or not. For the fifth condition, the virtual character is completely unaware; since a head- mounted display (HMD) was placed on his face. Results, implications, and limitations are discussed. Keywords: Virtual reality · Virtual driver awareness · Autonomous vehicle · Cognitive anxiety · Somatic anxiety · Car passenger 1 Introduction An autonomous vehicle, which is also known as a self-driving car, is capable of sensing the environment and the nearby obstacles in order to navigate itself without the need of a driver (i.e., human input) [33]. Autonomous vehicles enable hands-off-wheel and foot-off-pedal operation [2], and there is no need for the driver to fully focus on the internal operations of the car or on the external road traffic. Autonomous vehicles are becoming increasingly popular [32] and according to Calvert et al. [3], the production of autonomous vehicles will start to increase significantly from 2020. To make this happen, car manufacturing companies are trying to incorporate intelligent technologies to the cars to allow them to more precisely navigate autonomously without causing any issues to other cars, pedestrians, and of course the passengers [22]. To achieve this, a variety of techniques and hardware are combined [14]. Even if car manufacturing companies try to improve the reliability of the autonomous vehicle, many drivers and passengers remain skeptical about this new technology [15]. The car manufacturing companies need to gain consumer c  Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 G. Bebis et al. (Eds.): ISVC 2020, LNCS 12509, pp. 654–665, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64556-4_51