Be Driven, Work Together: The Emergence of Autonomous Vehicles as Collaborative Workspaces

Autonomous vehicles allow people to focus on parallel tasks while the vehicle handles the driving task itself. This enables new opportunities like mobile workspaces. This paper explores the conceptualization and prototyping of a collaborative workspace in autonomous vehicles. Through a user-centered design approach, we developed a concept that utilizes the space of the vehicle interior, particularly windows, as interactive display surfaces. A prototype was simulated in virtual reality to empirically investigate its influence on collaborative work. Our work focused on two research questions: 1) How should a collaborative workspace in an autonomous vehicle be designed to utilize the unique spatial properties of an autonomous vehicle and 2) to what extend the proposed design supports Workspace Awareness, Social and Spatial Presence - factors of successful remote collaboration. The results of the empirical study indicate that including the utilization of the vehicle interior significantly improves Workspace Awareness and Social Presence compared to a layout centered only on the windshield as interaction surface. However, no significant differences were observed in Spatial Presence between the two layouts. This research highlights the potential of spatial interactions to transform autonomous vehicles into effective collaborative workspaces by leveraging the spatial affordances of the vehicle interior. It underscores the importance of user-centered design and utilizing simulation in virtual reality for the development of applications for non-driving related tasks. This work contributes to the understanding of how autonomous vehicles can be adapted for collaborative work, opening new possibilities for mobile workspaces.