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The Co-Drive Service: Probing into Preliminary Social Outcomes through Early-Stage Prototyping

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Submitted:

02 May 2024

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03 May 2024

Withdrawn:

06 August 2024

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Abstract

This paper describes the early-stage prototyping process developed to probe into the socio-cultural dimensions of the Co-Drive project, which is a new service concept for traveling and socializing by car between a real driver on a semi-automated car and a remote passenger connected via virtual reality from home. By focusing on the intertwining journeys of the two actors of the experience, the driver and the remote passenger, three key interactions have been isolated and addressed as separate prototyping interventions in the wild. Such a seamful prototyping strategy enabled the users to experiment the whole service although the technology was not yet completely developed, and more specifically it allowed them to accommodate and appropriate each part of the experience into their everyday activities, revealing initial evidences of the potential social impact drawn by a future deployment of the service.

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Subject: Arts and Humanities - Architecture

1. Introduction

Co-Drive is a new service concept for traveling and socializing by car between a driver on an automated vehicle and a remote passenger connected via virtual reality from home. It aims to foster new social interactions that wouldn’t likely happen in our living environment, such as intergenerational encounters between young and older people, and to reduce social isolation among older people. The Co-Drive concept builds on the premises that the convergence of automated driving and telepresence technologies could provide a new social context for personal interactions to emerge, that are neither dependent on any earlier established relationship nor based on age affinities. As remote passengers will likely be older adults and drivers younger ones, the Co-Drive concept could foster intergenerational encounters that wouldn’t naturally occur in our environment, at least in western cultures. According to the Co-Drive scenario [1], the service unfolds as follows. A prospective remote passenger can select a location from where to start her/his Co-Drive trip from among the many Co-Drive stops around the world which have been submitted by drivers and fed into the Co-Drive Atlas. The Co-Drive Atlas is built as a virtual environment which remote passengers can visit from their computer in order to browse among the possible locations for Co-Drive trips and book the one they prefer. After the remote passenger has chosen a location to start the remote car trip from, s/he need to place her/his digital avatar in front of the selected stop in the Atlas, so to book that specific Co-Drive trip. As a driver in the real world passes with her/his car nearby the location of a booked Co-Drive stop, the avatar is revealed as an AR visualization on the car windshield. The driver can decide to pull over, start engaging remotely with the person embodied in the avatar and eventually board her/him in the car as a remote passenger for a shared Co-Drive trip together. During a Co-Drive trip, the remote passenger can see the view from the car windshield as if s/he was sitting in the passenger seat, either using a desktop interface or a VR headset. Both the driver and the remote passenger can talk to each other live and the remote passenger will also have the opportunity to take the driving lead from home, meaning that s/he could drive the physical car remotely from home, which is a capability enabled by autonomous cars technology.

Concerning the car as a peculiar environment and social setting, many studies have described how driving is connected to sociality and how social interactions between the driver and passengers are interlaced with the process of driving. Dant and Laurier consider driving together a form of social group moving and of being together [2]. Dant and Martin highlight the degree of intimacy that could be reached among the driver and the passengers when sharing a car trip, and how through a trip together one can get to know someone much more quickly than in other social contexts [3]. Dant even introduced the concept of "Driver-Car assemblage" as a distinct social being acting in our society [4]. Drawing from this specific concept, we look at Co-Drive as the new assemblage of "Driver-Remote Passenger- Automated Car" and we focus our research on an early assessment of its social value prior to the development of any sophisticated complex technology. As the service concept of "remote co-driving" between the driver and the remote passenger has been proposed by us in previous research with promising results [5], based on that we have expanded the prototyping effort onto the whole service journey, focusing on the different interactions unfolding among the driver and the remote passenger. In this paper we firstly frame Co-Drive as an extended reality (XR) experience, then we introduce a seamful prototyping strategy for early-stage developed XR. As a conclusion, we synthesize four main insights gained from the participating drivers and remote passengers which outlined the preliminary social impact of the Co-Drive service: fighting isolation and solitude; Co-Drive as a trigger to travelling; enabling new social interactions by increasing technological self-confidence; increasing the opportunities and willingness to opening up to strangers.

2. Co-Drive Service as an XR Experience

The Co-Drive service is grounded on the situated social experience of a shared car trip [6] [2], yet it expands such a real experience by enabling it between two persons who are not physically close to each other by means of mixed reality (MR) technologies [7], such as AR and VR. By combining both reality and imagined settings, Co-Drive belongs to the extended reality (XR) domain, and it embeds one of its major current objectives: to immerse multiple people simultaneously in both imagined and reality grounded shared experiences [8]. Originally, back in 1962, XR was first used as a term by Wyckoff to indicate eXtended Response photographic film [9], which is a photographic film designed to extend our human ability to see and allow people to see nuclear explosions and other phenomena beyond the range of normal human vision through black and white pictures. Later, in 1991, Mann and Wyckoff built a first wearable “XR vision” device as a prototype of AR/VR headset for human augmentation and sensory extension [10]. Beyond the possibility of augmenting human sensory capabilities, in their pioneering document [11] Mann and Wyckoff also attributed to XR a social dimension because it could deliver immersive social experiences. They reported that "unlike VR which is typically a solo experience, XR is a shared experience" as a larger group of people than the main users can participate in the experience and affect it through their presence and interactions. Currently, there are several definitions of XR among scholars and practitioners, which contributes in making the term even more ambiguous and somehow mysterious. The way XR is framed in this paper builds on the concept of MR-mixed reality, as defined by Milgram and Kishino [7], and expands it beyond its technological perspective towards a more ecological and cultural approach. Milgram and Kishino identified different hybrid environments which present a mixture of real and virtual world and organized them along a "virtuality continuum", going from the pure real to the pure virtual environment, as shown in Figure 1.

Examples of mixed realities are augmented reality (AR), where the real world is augmented with virtual features, and augmented virtuality (AV), where the virtual world is augmented with real features. When they firstly introduced the concept of the "virtuality continuum", they were focusing on the technological aspect, looking at discrete "display situations" in an attempt of building a taxonomy for existing hybrid displays. They were taking into consideration neither users criteria nor the type of content to differentiate between formats [12] . Likewise, Hirose et al. suggested that mixed reality interactions usually occupy a specific point in the continuum instead of spreading over it [13], thus involving that the user interacts with a single interface for the fruition of the experience. Anyway, as the technology and connectivity supporting hybrid experiences continues to develop towards better real-time communication and high-fidelity representation, the perspective on MR applications has been embracing a much more socially-oriented horizon than ever before. Billinghurst at al. acknowledged that as mixed realities experiences permeate human and social activities, discrete MR interfaces could not be enough to capture the complexity of people’ interactions. Users often may prefer to be able to easily switch between interface types for a more natural fruition of the experience, introducing what they called "transitional interfaces" [14] [15]. An ecological-cultural approach towards XR experiences thus implies to shift the attention from a single MR interaction towards a plurality of interactions happening along the continuum line and to take account of the possible collectives of interactive users in real world settings. In a recent revisitation of the virtuality continuum, Skarbez et al. also accounted for the discountinuity of the reality-virtuality continuum and reflected on how broader contemporary XR experiences can be if compared to what believed before [16].

3. Literature Review

In this section, we present a double front literature review. We cover previous research on the methods of early-stage prototyping for XR experiences, as well as we review significant examples of immersive experiences against social isolation.

3.1. Early Stage Prototyping for XR

As the technical development of XR applications relies on the time consuming work of highly skilled professionals [17], designers urge to come up with new ways for (rapid) prototyping XR experiences in a way that take into account the complexity of their socio-cultural settings and multiple users. Increasingly more often, researchers with an interest in XR have been engaged in the creation and validation of rapid prototyping methods for XR experiences for the use of non technical people. Speicher et al. [18] have been framing a prototyping landscape for AR/VR and grouped the available tools into three main categories: physical, digital, and physical-digital prototyping tools. The difference among the categories is based on the entry barrier for creators, as well as the fidelity of the interactions that can be reached. Physical prototyping encompasses paper dioramas and tools such as miniStudio [19], C-Space [20], ARcadia [21], and StoryMakAR [22]. Dioramas have been just used as stages for storytelling with no interactive capability, (they might get activated through means of digital content, as we will see in the physical-digital category later); while the other mentioned tools use physical materials as projection surfaces or for tracking purposes to prototype AR/VR designs.

Digital prototyping includes high fidelity tools such as Unity and Unreal, which enable the most realistic outcomes, but do require extensive programming. However, in this category we also find medium fidelity tools requiring no programming skills, such as Pronto [23], RealitySketch [24] and XRDirector [25]. They are based on human enactment and physical object movement and how this kind of interactions are bound to a digital counterpart. Digital-physical prototyping, the emerging category between paper-based and programming-required prototyping, includes tools such as ProtoAR, 360Proto and 360theater. ProtoAR [26] enables to quickly sketch digital AR overlays from paper drawings or play-dough models. 360Proto [27] requires the use of a particular 360 equirectangular grid template where to draw the scene onto and build a diorama. It does require some training to learn how to sketch on it. As the scene and the overlayered paper cut-outs are hand-drawn, the visual outcome is not realistic. Finally, 360theater [18] elevates lo-fi diorama prototyping, such as 360Proto, to a higher fidelity since it enables digital 3D objects to inhabit the AR/VR scene. 360theater allows the user to interact with the AR/VR scene and the overlayed digital objects from the mobile device, as the interactive behaviour of the objects are controlled via a Wizard of Oz feature of the system [28]. This tool, though enhancing paper-based diorama prototyping to medium-high fidelity, requires the active involvement of a team of researchers with different roles during the prototyping session.

However, even the most-friendly-to-designers tools seems to fail to address the prototyping of XR experiences beyond the single, discrete interactions happening on the device interface. There is a whole ecology of interactions happening over time in the environment, its surroundings, and between users, which are not yet considered in the prototyping process and encompass much more than AR overlaying on a screen [16], just to mention an easy example. As the existing tools manage with different fidelity to test punctual, proxemics AR/VR interactions happening in a specific moment on an interface, we think that the next challenge for XR early-stage prototyping will be to "zoom out the device", towards considering the XR experience as a whole and in its socio-cultural context.

3.2. Immersive Experiences against Social Isolation

Many examples of immersive experiences against social isolation emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic, due to the increased loneliness and anxiety which was caused by social distancing policies. Most of them are based on social virtual reality delivered through various online platforms, such as Altspace VR, VRChat, Mozilla Hubs, and provide a quick way towards engaging in social activities without leaving the house. People can access the online environments being represented as avatars. They can meet and communicate with other people who are present in the environment and perform a variety of virtual actions, ranging from attending to family events, travelling, wondering into fantasy scenarios, exploring virtual exhibitions and playing games. Moreover, accessing such VR environments wearing the head mounted display (HMD) can highly improve the quality of the experience and the feeling of being immersed. As the elderly population was particularly effected by quarantine measures enforced during the lockdown worldwide, resulting in a significant reduction of occasions for social interactions [29], different attempts of engaging them through social VR platforms over that period were performed. Finnegan et al. designed several VR prototypes in VRChat and prototyped them with elderly people, demonstrating that the space and the activities performed in VR do matter when tackling loneliness and isolation in elderly people [30]. Their research pointed out that social VR research has so far focusing on passive consumption of content on reliving the past, while their findings suggest that supporting the formation of groups around new activities to perform together could be key in the design of VR experiences for elderly people. Kenyon et al. used Altspace VR [31] with seniors and adults in general. Their study revealed significantly lower levels of loneliness and social anxiety in participants when engaged in the social VR platform, as well as lower levels of loneliness and social anxiety were associated with participants who socialised with a regular group of friends. As out-of-the-shelf product, MyndVR instead offers isolated and hospitalized elderly people different entertainment and therapeutic experiences, which can be shared with family loved ones who join from the tablet [32]. Moving away from any therapeutic aim and age restriction, yet still answering to the Covid-19 confinement and preclusion to travel, developer Erkam Seker created the app "Drive & Listen" [33], which enables to virtually travel to cities all over the world while listening to local radio. The trick is done through the streaming of high quality video recordings of car or motocycle trips from the point of view of the driver, which can be watched from the smartphone or laptop display.

4. The XR Experience Diagram

In this section we deepen into the conceptualization of an early-stage prototyping strategy for Co-Drive. Embracing the "zooming out the device" challenge which we recognized for XR prototyping tools in section 3.1, we designed a prototyping strategy which could elicit a socio-cultural perspective onto Co-Drive. In order to focus on the intertwining user journeys of the two main actors of the service, the driver and remote passenger, we built a specific tool: the "XR experience diagram".

4.1. The Tool: How to Build and Use It

Aiming to expand the well-known Milgram and Kishino’s “virtuality continuum” [7], the XR experience diagram has been conceived as a tool to elicit a socio-cultural perspective onto complex, multi actors extended reality (XR) experiences, such as Co-Drive, whose interactions span over time from the pure real world to the virtual one thanks to multiple hybrid interfaces. The XR experience diagram is composed by a X and Y axis, where the X axis exactly reports the Milgram and Kishino’s virtuality continuum and the Y axis represents the timeline of the to-be-studied XR experience, split in its main phases. In our case, we split the Co-Drive experience timeline into the following three main subsequent phases:

1/: Setting up the Co-Drive stop as departure point

The driver identifies potential locations in her/his surroundings where remote passenger could start their car trip from and add them as Co-Drive stops to the Atlas [34]. The remote passenger looks for a departing location for her/his remote car trip among the stops featured in the Co-Drive Atlas and selects a stop where to place her/his avatar to book a car trip.

2/: Driver and remote passenger meet for the first time

The driver who passes by the stop where an avatar is anchored gets to spot the avatar as an AR overlay on the car windshield. At the stop, the driver decides to pull over and both the driver in the car and the remote passenger from home start conversing for the first time.

3/: Remotely sharing the car trip

The driver hosts the remote passenger in her/his car as a virtual presence. The passenger enjoys a shared, yet virtual, car trip together with the driver and eventually takes the driving lead.

We refer to the resulting empty diagram as the base map of the Co-Drive experience diagram (Figure 2).

Once such a base map has been set up, we can use it to study any XR experience by performing on it the following operations:

populating the map with meaningful interactions of the XR experience;
drawing the users’ interactional trajetories.

To populate the base map of the Co-Drive experience, we identified six meaningful interactions; created low-fidelity pictures to represent them and numbered them sequentially from 1 to 6 (Figure 3). Then we placed each representative picture in the related area of the diagram, taking into consideration the Co-Drive timeline and the different environments of the virtuality continuum. Picture 1) is about the driver choosing a specific place as a Co-Drive stop in the real environment; 2) is about the remote passenger visiting the Co-Drive Atlas and placing her/his avatar in front of a virtual stop to book the trip in augmented virtuality; 3) is about the driver seeing the AR avatar as an overlay on its car windscreen in augmented reality; 4) is about the driver and the remote passenger first encounter and introductory talk in two different augmented realities, the augmented car and the augmented living room. We assume that the driver establishes a first contact with the remote passenger from the car and that the remote passenger gets to meet the driver through the smart tv; 5) is about the driver hosting the remote passenger during the car trip in augmented reality; 6) is about the remote passenger enjoying the car trip and driving the car remotely from home in virtual reality. This mapping activity visually revealed how Co-Drive experience spreads out along the virtuality continuum, occupying each available spot from the real environment to the virtual reality (Figure 4)

The second operation followed. It consisted of drawing the interactional trajectories of the remote passenger and the driver by linking in a line the interactions belonging to each of them. We used different strokes to identify the interactional trajectories of the two actors (Figure 4). Interactional trajectories were originally conceptualized by Benford et al. [35] to understand complex user experiences that extend over space and time and involve multiple roles and interfaces. Inspired by emerging studies of tangible interfaces and interactions in cultural and social settings (museums and galleries), they suggested that user journeys should maintain a sense of coherence and connectedness to the whole, as users were passing through different places, times, roles and interfaces. By looking at user journeys with the lens of trajectories, the focus is drawn from the devices towards the narrative shaping and steering trajectories, the encounters among people, and "all the interesting things that occur along the way" [36]. This trajectory drawing activity pushed our focus away from discrete, device-bounded, AR/VR interactions towards the Co-Drive social experience which happened in between.

We refer to the resulting complete diagram as the Co-Drive XR experience diagram (Figure 4).

4.2. Towards a Seamful Prototyping Strategy

The Co-Drive XR experience diagram revealed seams both within a single trajectory and across the two trajectories, as users move across physical and virtual environments in various configurations and key transitions should ensure the continuity of the experience. Seams within a single trajectory: sometimes users move from one environment to the other one in sequence along the continuum line (the X axis). This is visible in interaction 1 and 3 (Figure 4), when the driver places a Co-Drive stop (Real Environment) and later s/he spots the remote passenger’s avatar on the windscreen (Augmented Reality). Sometimes the environments are "far but connected". This is visible in interaction 4 and 6, when the remote passenger virtually moves from her/his home into the driver’s car (Real Environment), and remotely experiences a car trip wearing a VR headset (Virtual Environment).

Seams across the two trajectories: the trajectories show how the remote passenger and driver journeys interleave along the environments. This is the case of frames 1 and 2, when the driver journey interrupts after the creation of a Co-Drive stop (Real Environment), and the remote passenger is expected to place her/his own avatar at that stop as a next step (Augmented Virtuality).

Previous literature has suggested various and even opposite approaches on how to deal with seams in ubiquitous systems, ranging from hiding to revealing and exploiting them for the sake of the experience. As Chalmers and Galani pointed out [37], interactions may become seamless and unproblematic, even if the differences, boundaries and seams in media are objectively perceivable. They theorised and experimented seamful design, an approach which takes advantage of the gaps and heterogeneity in order to give people space to appropriate the media within their social interactions and local environment. Embracing the seamful design approach, as well as looking opportunistically at the unreadiness level of the Co-Drive technology at the early-stage of its development, we came up with a prototyping strategy which exploited the seams as an opportunity for the users to accommodate and make sense of the service at their own pace.

5. Seamful prototyping

5.1. Isolating the Prototyping Interventions

We developed the seamful prototyping strategy for Co-Drive by isolating key interactions from those ones retraced on the XR experience diagram and by addressing them as separated prototyping interventions. The selection of the prototyping interventions was done according to: i) the appropriateness of the fidelity which could be reached within a rapid prototyping process (for instance, the embodiment of the remote passenger inside the car was excluded); ii) the engagement of both the driver and the remote passenger; iii) touching upon the most socially-meaningful moments of the experience.

The following three key interactions were selected to be prototyped as separated interventions:

I1): the placement of the Co-Drive stops by the driver;
I2): the booking of a Co-Drive trip by the remote passenger;
I3): the shared car trip by the driver and the remote passenger.

5.2. The Prototyping Plan

The seamful prototyping strategy progressively took shape through the following process: mapping of the XR experience diagram - isolating key prototyping interventions - running the interventions - reflecting on people’s accommodation and appropriation of the experience. As the prototyping process proceeded in separated interventions, the orchestration and facilitation of each intervention was instrumental to maintain the participants aligned, aware of their relative position in the experience and engaged in the overall narrative. The timeframe for the prototyping process encompassed 15 months, from September 2020 to November 2021, a considerably long time due to the fact that Covid-19 pandemic in Italy slowed down or even blocked the experimentation. The interventions took place sequentially and involved a variable number of people, according to the aim of the intervention, as well as the contingencies of the pandemic, as shown in Figure 5.

Concerning the participants, 6 persons aged from 75 to 91 y.o. were recruited as remote passengers, even if one withdrew in intervention I3 for reasons linked to the pandemic. The remote passengers attended an elderly day care in Rome, Italy, and were recruited on a voluntary basis. The drivers instead were recruited through an online open call which was spread through the researcher’s personal network, the project website and social media.

The sessions were run by a leading researcher, in the role of the facilitator, and by a social worker affiliated to the elderly care center. The role of the social worker was essential in time of pandemic. He acted as the host of the sessions and occasionally as the physical twin of the researcher, when the Covid-19 restrictions in Italy prevented the seniors and the researcher to meet physically, but still exclusively the social worker was allowed to reach the seniors at home for the routinely care.

Isolating prototyping interventions required the leading researcher to come up with as many prototyping scripts and artifacts as the number of interventions themselves. Prototyping artifacts consisted of props, tools, video prototypes, and interactive applications, and ranged from low to medium-high fidelity. The artifacts were designed to be the most appropriate way to engage the specific users in the experience. This was particularly important in respect to the remote passengers who participated in the prototyping, since they were all senior adults with no familiarity with augmented and virtual reality.

In the following paragraphs, we dive into the deployment of the three prototyping interventions.

5.3. I1/ The Placement of a Co-Drive Stop

For the sake of the prototyping intervention, the collection of Co-Drive stops was released through an online public call diffused through social media and the researchers’ personal network. Participants were asked to enact a situated intervention as well as to answer to an online web-form. They were required to physically inspect the space; provide reasons for their selection; give or not their availability to be a driver; envision future interactions among the driver and the remote passenger; indicate geolocation coordinates; and take a picture of themselves at the place while holding the “Co-Drive stop” sign, which was made available for them to print on the website. The situated intervention aimed to explore the social construction of the Co-Drive stop as a place by the driver [34] as well as to collect stops to be featured in the Atlas and recruit perspective drivers for the future prototyping phase of the virtual shared trips. In the future development of Co-Drive, we imagine that the placement of the CO-Drive stops could be done through a mobile app for the drivers.

Participant L., for instance, submitted the Co-Drive stop in Rovereto, Italy, (Figure 6), and argumented her choice as follows: “ At the stop, [I would like to have] a sign painted on the floor or a street lamp. The contact information should include a telephone number, because not all the interested passengers might be tech-savvy with the use of smartphone, qr-codes, websites, etc. There are stairs at the fountain in the center and benches where remote passengers could “ wait” for the ride. This to give them a more immersive experience.”

The collected Co-Drive stops were featured in the Co-Drive Atlas, which was later built in VR as a Mozilla Hubs space for remote passengers to visit [38].

5.4. I2/ The Booking of a Co-Drive Trip

An interactive AR diorama was built to show remote passengers that they could place their avatar at a chosen Co-Drive stop, as a way to book a Co-Drive trip departing from that place (Figure 7).

The interactive diorama features i) a background scene of the Co-Drive stop at the Colosseum in Rome, consisting of a printed panoramic picture, and ii) a miniature car (1/10 scale) equipped with an IPhone XR as the interactive windscreen. The Adobe Aero software, which is an AR prototyping tool, runs on the device. An anchor image is positioned on the background picture to allow an AR content to be displayed. By enacting the interaction inside the diorama, the remote passenger avatar gets revealed at the Co-Drive stop on the miniature-car windscreen (the Iphone display), as soon as the smartphone camera identifies the anchor image on the background picture. The AR diorama allows to represent a medium-high fidelity experience of a driver from a scaled perspective, yet demonstrating the technology, and to narrate to perspective remote passengers how their presence would be embodied in their avatar at the selected Co-Drive stop. The reasons why we went for an interactive scaled diorama enabling a 3rd person view were multiple: i) we didn’t have at our disposal an interactive, full scale, car windscreen; ii) since the users were completed inexperienced of XR technologies, we had to provide a medium-high fidelity prototype so to avoid any need to "imagining the technology"; iii) we wanted to focus the attention of the experience in the environment, rather then on the "device".

Due to Covid-19 pandemic, the diorama could not be enacted in presence, so a video of it was remotely shown during each individual prototyping session at the user’s home. Following the screening of the diorama video, each participant was invited to select her/his own avatar from the ones available in the avatars board (Figure 8).

The avatars board was a paper-based tool designed for this prototyping intervention which comprehended a total of 11 avatars. It was organized into 4 sections, according to the kind of representation: realistic, cartoonish, robotic, animal shaped. Participants were invited to overlay the avatar transparent cards on top of the printed pictures of the Co-Drive stops to get an idea of how the avatar would fit in the context. Some participants reflected on the role of the avatars in relation to the context and the situated, yet virtual interaction with the driver. Participant F., 80+ y.o., interestingly selected different avatars to match with the peculiar spirit of each location and explained it as follows: “ I think I would like to have different avatars for different cities... I would chose the robot avatar for New York, to match with the sense of modernity, and the cat for the Colosseum, of course! And then, the doll- looking avatar for Rovereto, as it reminds me of my childhood dolls.” Participant G. refused to be represented by an animal- shaped avatar because she felt it inappropriate for the first encounter with the human driver in a public space.

One month later, each participant was invited to a follow-up of this prototyping session. Eventually the participants could visit the VR Atlas and see their digital avatar placed at the selected Co-Drive stop. The buffer time was needed for the digital production of the medium-high fidelity version of the VR Atlas and avatars in Mozilla Hubs. Moreover, the participants were also confronted with a hyper realistic version of their avatar (Figure 9), which was produced from a photo taken during the previous appointment.

While the paper-based selection of the avatars allowed people to focus on the social representation of themselves in XR, without any friction deriving from the unfamiliarity of the technology, the follow-up was needed to convey participants an as-smooth-as-possible first experience of their virtual self.

5.5. I3/ The shared Car Trip

Each remote passenger participated to three shared car trips in three different cities in Italy where the relative drivers placed their Co-Drive stops and made themselves available to drive for the experiment. The drivers were all around 40 y.o, two males and one female. Based on a prototype home-shipping protocol already experimented in previous researches and demos [39] [40], the drivers were shipped the car equipment in advance so that they could mount it on their cars and test it. On the day of the trip, the researcher and the social worker reached the senior at home or at the elderly center and managed the technical aspects of the trip. The plan was that the seniors would gradually try 3 possible interfaces to join the trip from: the laptop, the VR headset and the wall projection, as shown in Figure 10.

In all cases, the system prototype provided a high fidelity experience to both driver and remote passenger. As the camera in the car streamed 360°, the remote passenger would be able to enjoy the trip as if s/he was sitting at the passenger seat and to look around either through the laptop mousepad or by turning the head while wearing the VR headset. Through the system, the remote passenger and the driver could talk to each other in real time during the whole trip. There was not a fixed duration for the trips: it was left to the participants to end them, even if it was influenced by the power consumption of the equipment and its overheating. Each trip lasted around 20/30 minutes. Before leaving, the researcher left to each participant a postcard picturing the driver at the Co-Drive stop and invited the remote passenger to write a reflection on it to share it back at the following session (Figure 11).

Concerning the remote passengers, their reactions were really various. Some of them were happy to have the chance to visit again a place that already had a personal meaning in their life, like participant P. who had her honey moon in the city visited during one of the trips. When instead the place was new to the participants, the passengers tried to get as much as possible from the view, trying to draw insights on the local people and discuss with the driver about that. Lot of talks were about knowing each other: the driver and the passenger were jumping from personal topics to more casual chats about the place. It was also interesting to attend on how the passengers were influencing the drivers on the way to drive through: sometimes to allow a better view, with improved light conditions, the driver made the route twice or decided to stop and park for a while. About the use of the VR headset, we surprisingly didn’t come across any rejection to try it. We believe that it may be because participants were gradually introduced to it, at the very end of the prototyping process, and as an option among the laptop and the wall projection. A couple of participants asked to join a trip with a fellow passenger from the elderly center, so that the conservation could be richer among the three. To meet that request, both participants were invited to the elderly center and the trip was displayed through a wall projection. Concerning the drivers, all of them planned the route to drive through in advance in order to give a particular focus to their conversation, as well as not to adventure through locations with reduced mobile data connection which would have made the system fail. Driver M. tried to show the neighbourhood where he lived, revealing some insights on the history of Milan. Participant M. also reflected on the fact that he would need some neutral topics to talk about, so that the conversation would not be unbalanced. As the drivers were asked to answer to a small interview after the trips, we collected some reflections from them. All agreed that a working audio connection with reduced latency is key to feel the remote passengers present in the car. Driver L. and M. described Co-Drive as an experience of "being together" and sharing, more than travelling. The "travel" was just an excuse to be together. Drivers also reflected on the age gap with the remote passengers. Driver M. reported: "[...] I have many acquaintances of 60 y.o.+, but none of them is a "friend". I think it is a complex thing to make friends with a person older than you, because there is an unconscious barrier for both. Then, under some conditions, this barrier may fall apart and we may find out we have the same interests and curiosity towards life."

6. Discussion

In the final part of the paper, we discuss the two contributions of this study: on the one hand the seamful prototyping strategy as a methodological contribution to early-stage XR prototyping; on the other hand the preliminary social outcomes as a potential impact to elderly wellbeing and intergenerational relationships.

6.1. What’s the Value of the Seamful Prototyping Strategy?

Based on our observation, we learnt that there is a value of having participants going through the different phases of the experience, although the technology was not quite ready and many times participants had to deal with paper or video-based prototypes. The seamful prototyping strategy was meant to prevent from going straight forward to the shared trip and the VR headset, thus to give space to the emergence to all those personal reflections and actions that may happen in between, while preparing for a trip. Between deciding and really going on a trip, there is a gap where you put substance and content, and we wanted also to elicit that through our prototyping strategy. In fact, we saw that participants managed to make a parallel with real life between planning a trip in the real world ( they need to prepare the luggage, get information, and so on) and going for a Co-Drive trip, for instance by creating their avatar, selecting the Co-Drive destination and positioning the own avatar at the Co-Drive stop.

Besides that, we also observed that the experience prototyping strategy had a particular impact on the participants who had absolutely no experience with XR technologies and, only a few of them, just an initial acquaintance with common digital devices, such as computer and smartphone. Our prototyping strategy contributed to avoid preventive rejection in newcomers because it lowered the entry barrier for those who have never been making use of technology in their life and do not find a reason to be starting at a later age. We think that this may be due to the fact that in the single prototyping sessions the commitment to learn, as well as the interactivity was set to very low and gradual, so that people could focus on the meaning of the Co-Drive experience and not on making it work. Lowering the entry barrier also increased the possibility for unmotivated people to discover new, exciting experiences and to be tickled by the curiosity of introducing new technologies in their life. For the few participants who had an initial knowledge of digital technologies, the strategy contributed to increase their self-confidence in the use of technology. The seamful prototyping strategy revealed the structure of the Co-Drive experience, how it was being built and the technology failures in the system. This provided a safe, technologically incomplete environment for participants to rehearse the experience within at their own pace, without the risk of "failing" themselves, plus it made people more aware and in control of the technology.

6.2. Preliminary Social Outcomes

Based on the observations collected during the study and frequent talks with the elder participants acting as remote passengers, the following preliminary social outcomes have been outlined.

Fighting isolation and solitude

During the study, we witnessed elderly participants (re)activate a sort of non-familiar social network of relationships by getting to know the drivers. Many of the participants do not receive any visit expect from routinary relatives visits or by the social workers. Due to mobility limits, at some point in their later life, many of them couldn’t anymore enjoy a walk in the neighbourhood, a visit to the day care or to a friend, and have ended up confined in their house with no opportunity to have extra or occasional social contact with friends or new people. The relationships built through Co-Drive between the driver and the remote passenger, although being sporadic, are characterized to be reciprocal, and not expression of "asymmetrical care": during the car trip both persons are engaged to discover each other.

Co-Drive as a trigger to travelling

Elderly participants showed a renovated "intentionality of travelling" [41] through the Co- Drive system, motivated by two main reasons i) meeting new people; ii) pushing the boundaries of their own world. The social worker reported that, during the interruptions happening between the actual deployment of the prototyping interventions, the elderly people were repeatedly asking when the new trip would happen and with which driver, whether s/he was the same as the previous trip or imagining how s/he would be like and drive. Moreover, remote passengers actively requested far away trip destinations to other continents [42] since Co-Drive could represent for them an accessible alternative to get an experience of travelling, though different from a real travel, to places that they couldn’t reach due to old age related health and mobility issues.

Increasing technological self-confidence as enabler of new social interactions

As explained in section 3.5, the gradual engagement of the remote passengers into the Co-Drive service showed that even the most advanced XR experience can be crafted so to lowering the entry barrier by i) attunement to the own pace of the less expert users and ii) including an helper assistance to access the unfamiliar interfaces (for instance, switching on the VR headset). While this aspect showed to increase the older people self-confidence in their own technological skills, on the other hand it reflected onto their growing request in embarking onto new social interactions through Co-Drive.

Opening up to strangers

One of the most interesting results of the Co-Drive study has been the diffused tendency of remote passengers to open- up to strangers (aka the drivers) and the immediate trust that has emerged between them. This was observed also with specific participants who are known to be very shy and use to avoid interacting with unknown people at the day care. We hypothesize that this may occur due to a series of concurring factors. First of all, the fact that people apply on a voluntary basis to participate as a driver or as a remote passenger already ensures a sort of affinity selection among participants. As Greenblat and Gagnon tell [43]: " [...] travelers more often expand or change their social space from choice rather than from necessity. In this sense they volunteer to move temporarily from the familiar world to the world of strangers." As another reason, we think that the context of the shared car trip, which already in the real world eases strangers meeting and the breaking of their social barrier [44], transfers pretty smoothly in the virtual world. Moreover, boarding a stranger’s car as a virtual, remote passenger, enables a much easier access because it erases any self-security related issue. As a curious final motivation, it seems that remote passengers’ trust towards the drivers also draws from the driving style s/he shows, as if any potential car accident could affect their safety in the virtual world.

6.3. Limitation of the Study

We acknowledge that the outcomes we presented are drawn from the participation of a limited number of respondents, which cannot be representative of the population, however we do not claim them to be either universal or definitive truth. We invite to read our preliminary social outcomes from a design anthropology prospective [45], as initial results of socio-material interventions which have critically informed our perspective on the issue of social isolation among the elderly and intergenerational relationships. Such results created other points of discourse by challenging and reframing dominant conversations on XR technologies and disclosed new departing sites to continue engaging with the project and scaling up the experimentation.

7. Conclusions

This paper described the early-stage prototyping study of the Co-Drive service. We aimed to make a methodological contribution by introducing the seamful prototyping strategy for XR experiences, as well as to outline the preliminary social outcomes of the Co-Drive concept. By exploiting the seams in the user journeys of the driver and remote passenger, we tried to elicit the social processes linked to the use of the Co-Drive service. By means of drawing parallelism and point of contacts between the Co-Drive experience and their own life, participants managed to accommodate and appropriate the service at their own pace, in their existing network of relationships and context of life. They created cross-reality seams between the Co-Drive experience and their daily life, whose evidences can be retraced in their oral comments and in physical probes. One example is by participant G. and her concern in selecting a proper avatar whose appearance could suit the first encounter with an unknown driver in public space, rejecting the idea of an animal avatar. A physical example could be by participant F. and the postcard of the driver at the Co-Drive stop which she displayed among the family pictures on the cupboard. Based on our observation and talks with remote passengers, we drew the preliminary results of our study, which suggested that Co-Drive could reduce elderly isolation and solitude; trigger a new intentionality of travelling at a late age; enable intergenerational relationships by increasing technological self-confidence and foster an opening up attitude towards unknown people. Inscribing such results as preliminary social outcomes which demands further study, the early-prototyping study encourages the future development and deployment of Co-Drive as, for instance, an experimental service for elderly care settings.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, Laura Boffi; Data curation, Gianluca Boccia; Formal analysis, Laura Boffi and Gianluca Boccia; Investigation, Laura Boffi; Methodology, Laura Boffi; Visualization, Laura Boffi; Writing – original draft, Laura Boffi; Writing – review & editing, Laura Boffi.

Funding

This research was part of the first author’s PhD research. No extra funding has been received to write and publish this paper.

Informed Consent Statement

Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to all the participants who took part in the study, challenged the pandemic and trusted the process and us, the researchers.

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Figure 1. The virtuality continuum by Migram and Kishino (adapted from Milgram and Kishino [7].

Figure 2. The base map of the XR experience diagram applied to Co-Drive: the X axis is the Milgram and Kishino’s virtuality continuum and the Y axis is the Co-Drive timeline, split in the 3 main phases of Co-Drive. The space intercepted by the X and Y axis will be later populated with the interactions of the different actors of the experience.

Figure 3. The pictures which represent the meaningful interactions of the Co-Drive experience. They are numbered in sequence from 1 to 6.

Figure 4. The XR experience diagram of the Co-Drive service.

Figure 5. This table summarizes the recruitment and timeframe of the prototyping process.

Figure 6. Participant L. holding the Co-Drive stop sign at the square she submitted to the Atlas.

Figure 7. The AR diorama is composed by a miniature car and an Iphone whose display works as the AR enabled windscreen.

Figure 8. Two participants working on the selection of their own avatars and overlapping the transparent avatar card onto a Co-Drive stop picture. This prototyping session happened remotely while the researcher was connected through Google Meet with the participant.

Figure 9. A participant, pictured in the smartphone screen of the researcher, sees her hyper-realistic avatar. Again, the prototyping session happened remotely due to Covid-19 restrictions and this picture was taken by the researcher who was connected through Google Meet while both the researcher and the remote passenger were visiting the Atlas on Mozilla Hubs.

Figure 10. The remote passengers joining the Co-Drive trip from the laptop, VR headset and wall projection.

Figure 11. When we visited again participant F., we found out that she put the postcard together with her displayed photos (on the left). Participant P. compiled the postcard with some thoughts on her previous trip (on the right).

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The Co-Drive Service: Probing into Preliminary Social Outcomes through Early-Stage Prototyping

Abstract

1. Introduction

2. Co-Drive Service as an XR Experience

3. Literature Review

3.1. Early Stage Prototyping for XR

3.2. Immersive Experiences against Social Isolation

4. The XR Experience Diagram

4.1. The Tool: How to Build and Use It

4.2. Towards a Seamful Prototyping Strategy

5. Seamful prototyping

5.1. Isolating the Prototyping Interventions

5.2. The Prototyping Plan

5.3. I1/ The Placement of a Co-Drive Stop

5.4. I2/ The Booking of a Co-Drive Trip

5.5. I3/ The shared Car Trip

6. Discussion

6.1. What’s the Value of the Seamful Prototyping Strategy?

6.2. Preliminary Social Outcomes

6.3. Limitation of the Study

7. Conclusions

Author Contributions

Funding

Informed Consent Statement

Acknowledgments

References

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