“Open your eyes, I’m coming!” – Googly eyes make self-driving cars safer

Not only does it look cute, it also increases road safety - at least that's the result of a small study from Japan with 18 participants. The 9 women and 9 men decided more carefully whether to cross the street when the car looked wide-eyed.

The future of self-driving cars?

This was published in the ACM Digital Library (see HERE ) and is entitled “Can Eyes on a Car Reduce Traffic Accidents?”
Before we explain to you at length what the study says, just watch a short video about it:

By loading the video, you accept YouTube's privacy policy.
Learn more

Load video

Always unblock YouTube

In the video you can see a young man trying to cross the street but almost getting hit because the self-driving car didn't see him. However, the car with the googly eyes shows where it is “looking” and makes the young man act more cautiously: “Aha, it’s not looking at me right now, so I’d better wait.”

The trick behind it is also quite easy to explain: In normal traffic, pedestrians can make eye contact with the driver of a car to signal that they want to cross the street - an important factor that is missing in self-driving cars.

However, the video above only shows how the study basically went. The actual research took place with VR glasses so as not to endanger any of the participants.

The course of study

In the study, nine women and nine men aged 18 to 49 went through four scenarios with VR glasses: two in which the car was equipped with eyes and two in which it was not equipped with them.

If the vehicle was equipped with robotic eyes, it would either look at the pedestrian (and register its presence) or away (and not register it). The majority of participants decided against crossing the street if the car was not “looking” at them, while they were more careless with the cars without eyes - it was simply assumed that the vehicle would notice them.

While men made dangerous decisions (e.g., crossing the street even though the car didn't stop), women made inefficient decisions (e.g., not crossing the street even though the car stopped). However, both factors were reduced by the cars with the googly eyes: men became more cautious, women became braver.

Conclusion

The study is of course far too small to be able to draw direct conclusions that self-driving cars with googly eyes represent the future of road transport. But just imagine it: self-driving electric cars with big eyes looking around - wouldn't that be kind of cute? Or rather scary?

Article image: YouTube

Additional source:

The Science Times

Also interesting: Do you know Feng Shui, the Chinese teaching of harmonizing people with their environment?
It even works on Facebook because this month is supposed to be a “money bag” that only occurs every 823 years: 5 Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. Don't you think so? We neither! – “Money bag”? No, it doesn't just happen every 823 years!