The Two-User Seating Buck: Enabling Face-to-Face Discussions of Novel Car Interface Concepts

The automotive industry uses physical seating bucks, which are minimal mockups of a car interior, to assess various aspects of the planned interior early in the development process. In a virtual seating buck, users wear a head-mounted display (HMD) which overlays a virtual car interior on a physical seating buck. We have developed a two-user virtual seating buck system, which allows two users to take the role of the driver and co-driver respectively. Both users wear tracked head-mounted displays and see the virtual car interior from the respective view points enabling them to properly interact with the interface elements of a car. We use this system for the development, test and evaluation of novel human-machine interface concepts for future car models. We provide each user with an avatar, since the two co-located users need to see each others’ actions. Our evaluation of different head and hand models for representing the two users indicate that the user representations and motions ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: VR
• Authors: Holger Salzmann, Bernd Froehlich
• Keywords: Car Interior, Seating Buck, Virtual Reality, Virtual Seating Buck, VR 2008