General Motors sponsored a project exploring the possibilities of a heads up display in autonomous vehicles. We focused on Stage III and Stage IV autonomy, which means the vehicle is fully capable of driving itself. (However Stage III still requires supervision, while Stage IV does not.) I worked on this project with Matthew Quinn, Steve Vong, and Kyungjin Kim.

GM was generous enough to purchase a transparent OLED for the Georgia Tech School of Industrial Design's driving lab and we were able to use this for prototyping and user testing. 

We had many sample layouts sketched up to explore some options we had, and we ended up going with a dial menu for easy access and visibility. However, we also were aware most users still wanted to see the road, so this menu could expand and minimize as the user desires. 

Below is the main dial menu. The options around the center default to the user's most recent apps, and could be customized to hold a preferred set of apps instead. 

Below is the fully hidden menu, which allows for complete visibility when the menu isn't in use. 

Below is the interface with an obnoxious amount of demo apps opened. 

The center of the dial menu can be selected for the full range of apps. We only picked nine common apps for the sake of the prototype, but users suggested some interesting additions such as a dash camera to capture photographs or videos of the surroundings or a rear view camera. 

During our user research, we found most people were fairly nervous about a computer driving them around. So we made it a priority to work to reassure the user was still in control, even when they didn't have their hands on the steering wheel. 

As the users still wanted to know things such as car statuses or navigation, even when they weren't driving, we wanted to overlay this information on the real world. This could be as simple as a driving line following the vehicle's projected path, but we really wanted a "hotspots" function that told the user about the surroundings. These hotspots could be customized based on preferences and would display information on things such as historical sites, cultural centers, or even just good restaurants.

The OLED posed interesting design challenges when it came to color. The more white or saturated a color was, the more opaque it appeared. The less saturated or more black a color was, the more transparent it was. (Though a dark color could appear more solid if it were outlined with a white color, most likely due to the eye understanding the dark color was between the white lines and perceiving that in front of the background.)

We had to pick the colors we used carefully and then alter them on the OLED directly. Our original color pick ended up appearing partially transparent, which made it disorienting to look at when anything was moving behind the screen.

(Matthew Quinn is pictured below.) 

A photograph of our "don't" reference picture, the dark shadows, black product, and no clear outlines made this image almost impossible to make out on the OLED. 

At Georgia Tech's Senior Design Capstone of 2016, our team was awarded a golden ticket from the Inventure Prize. This ticket allowed us to skip the preliminary round of Inventure and move straight to the Semi-finals if we chose to register. 

Our whole team is pictured below: (From left to right) Steve Vong, Kyungjin Kim, Matthew Quinn, and myself, Florence Camick.