Effectiveness of Multimodal Display in Navigation Situation

With the development of technology, the interactive experience in the car has become more abundant, drivers have to face a large amount of information. In the navigation situation, drivers need to receive navigation information to make correct driving behavior, but this may increase drivers’ workload. The current display includes visual display, auditory display, and haptic display, but they have limitations. In order to solve the above problems and provide more suggestions for driving safety, this research explored the effectiveness of multimodal display and its merits than unimodal display in the navigation situation, dependent variables are driving behavior performance and subjective mental workload, eye tracking behavior. We adopted interview to explore current navigation situations and classified lane changing and turning have high workload than straight driving. The simulated driving experiment conducted in the later stage of research, it is 2 × 5 mixed experiment, the between-subjects factors are navigation situations (high load, low load), and the within-subjects’ factors are information display methods (visual, auditory, haptic, multimodal, control). The experiment recruited 18 participants and randomly divided them into two groups to experience each information display in turn. It is found that the multimodal display is good than visual modality under high load situations, and the lateral speed control of the driver is more stable under the multimodal condition. Although the mental workload of drivers under multimodal conditions did not show a significant difference from other conditions, the scores were still lower than other conditions. The multimodal display has the potential to ensure driving safety, but it need further research to discuss.