Immersive Audio HMI to Improve Situational Awareness

Humans’ are multimodal beings that perceive their environment with all their senses, which allows them to create situational awareness (van Laack, 2014). For driver vehicle interaction the idea of multimodality has been neglected in the past and displays became the most common information output in a cockpit. To handle the significant increase of traffic complexity and information availability inside the cockpit, a multimodal combination of immersive audio and visual representation can lead to a better user experience and a more intuitive human machine interaction (HMI). This paper introduces object based audio, an innovative technology to enable immersive audio HMI. The presented research suggests that object based audio can enhance the vehicle HMI by offering situational context and directional elements to the driver.