The number of studies examining the potential of immersive entertainment in automated vehicles is increasing. It has been demonstrated that synchronizing the visual content of virtual reality (VR) with the movements of the vehicle and matching the passenger's visual and experiential senses can enhance the immersive experience. In consideration of the preceding studies, this study proposes a novel immersive automatic driving system that prioritizes the vehicle's behavior during acceleration. The objective is to enable passengers to perceive a sense of hyper-acceleration that exceeds the actual acceleration, thereby facilitating a more immersive experience in automatic driving VR entertainment through the manipulation of vehicle behavior.

Passengers in autonomous vehicles enjoy the comfort of being free from driving tasks, but they inevitably experience anxiety caused by autonomous vehicle stress (AVS). AVS encompasses vehicle behavior stress due to unpredictable acceleration, and external environmental stress due to potential collisions. Past research has explored approaches to improve passengers’ comfort through behavior control and information presentation. However, methods that utilize stressful vehicle behavior in Extended Reality (XR) entertainment to distract from AVS-related anxiety are limited. Hence, the goal of this study was to maximize passenger comfort in automated vehicles. To achieve this goal, we implemented an XR entertainment system that utilizes vehicle behavior and evaluated its effect on reducing anxiety. In this study, we proposed “Hype D-Live”, an XR live music system designed to reduce anxiety by providing multimodal visual, auditory, force, and vestibular stimuli using a hemispherical display and motion platform mounted on a vehicle. We developed system functions to adjust the force and vestibular senses according to the excitement level of the music and the direction of stressful acceleration and to reproduce moshing, a characteristic behavior at live music venues. However, we hypothesized that passengers might not fully enjoy the entertainment and could experience anxiety if the video content makes them aware of the external environment. Therefore, we conducted an experiment with a within-participant design, involving 24 participants (14 males and 10 females), comparing 3 types of video content for XR entertainment inside the autonomous vehicle: a real external environment, a virtual simulation of the external environment, and a virtual live music venue. The Wilcoxon signed rank test with the Bonferroni correction after the Friedman test revealed that, without the moshing function, the virtual live music venue video significantly enhanced enjoyment and reduced anxiety, compared to the real one.

One of the stress factors for passengers in an autonomous vehicle is the stress from vehicle behavior caused by unpredictable acceleration, deceleration, and route changes. Although there are researches on stress reduction methods using behavior control and information presentation to realize a comfortable autonomous vehicle, there are still few methods for stress reduction and dissipation through application to XR entertainment. In this work, we propose "Hype Dlive", a system that utilizes vehicle behavior as XR live music performance, and aims to improve passenger comfort by utilizing vehicle behavior as tactile and vestibular stimuli to generate a sense of presence and excitement.