Can tech create more harmony between drivers? Getty

You’re driving along and someone cuts you up. You go to honk your horn or make an aggressive hand gesture, when a virtual note flashes up on your windscreen: “Rushing to the hospital”. Your anger dissipates and you feel empathy instead.

Chao Wang and his colleagues at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands have developed an augmented reality app designed to reduce road rage by improving communication between drivers. “In the US every year, 1500 people are injured or killed as a result of aggressive driving,” says Wang.

His prototype “social car” project puts a transparent screen in front of the driver on a section of windscreen that displays projected information from a smartphone, augmenting the driver’s view without blocking it. The app flashes up information about other drivers using the system when the phone’s camera spots their cars. A special periscope lens attachment allows the camera to see cars in front of the driver while it is lying flat to project images onto the screen.


At the moment, the camera recognises other cars by spotting a purpose-designed sticker placed on their rear window. But Wang says that automatic licence-plate recognition could be used in the future.

One feature of the system, called CarNote, allows drivers to select a virtual sign to display in extenuating circumstances, such as “going to the hospital” or “rushing to the airport”. Symbols or text appear above their car as viewed by the driver through the windscreen. To stop it being abused, there would be a limit on how often each person could use it, says Wang.

Another feature allows users to send Facebook-style “likes” and “dislikes” to other drivers. When someone gives way, you could give them a “like” to show your appreciation, and when someone cuts you up, a dislike. Wang even suggests that insurance companies could factor this into their prices. If someone gets a lot of dislikes, it could impact their rates.

Calmer driving

Findings from a trial suggest the app could reduce road rage. The system was used by 30 people in a driving simulation, in which they were faced with some cars that drove fast and frequently overtook other drivers and some that drove slowly.

Dashboard messenger HUD-AR

For half the participants, the speeding cars showed signs such as “in a hurry to the airport” and slow cars that got in the way indicated that they were searching for the right route. The other participants saw no signs. After completing the simulation, the volunteers took a questionnaire designed to gauge empathy. Overall, people who saw the signs were more empathetic and forgiving of the erratic drivers. The system did, however, also appear to distract drivers, but Wang’s team is looking to resolve this with future versions.

“The idea is quite sound,” says Fatjon Seraj at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. But while the AR app facilitates communication between drivers, future “connected cars” will probably be able to communicate directly with each other without the driver’s input on issues such as right of way, so its usefulness could be short-lived.

The work will be presented at the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces conference in Limassol, Cyprus, in mid-March.

Read more: How a raised hand from a pedestrian could stop driverless cars