Environment shapes trust and feelings in autonomous vehicle rides
When the Environment Becomes the Interface: Multisensory Environmental Interfaces for Human-AI Interaction in Autonomous Vehicles
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
When people ride in self-driving cars, they don’t tap buttons or screens to interact with the AI. Instead, the environment inside the car—such as lighting and smells—can influence how passengers feel and trust the AI. The authors found that how people perceived the atmosphere explained much of their overall experience, with smells playing a stronger role than lighting. This shows that the environment itself acts like an interface connecting people to AI, beyond traditional controls.
What this means in practice
- •For automotive interior designers: Optimize cabin lighting and scents to enhance passenger trust and comfort in autonomous vehicles by creating supportive multisensory environments.$Commercial implications: This enables design companies to create immersive car interiors improving user satisfaction and trust, a selling point for autonomous vehicle manufacturers.
- •For smart building engineers: Use coordinated lights and scents to create environments that support occupants’ trust and emotional well-being in intelligent spaces where direct control is limited.
Authors
Keqi Chen, Runjia Tan, Xinyi Fu, Shanhe Lou, Kwan Min Lee, Chen Lv
Abstract
As AI increasingly assumes operational control, human-computer interaction is shifting from operating systems through explicit interfaces to inhabiting intelligent environments. This raises a fundamental question: when users no longer directly manipulate a system, what mediates their relationship with intelligent technologies? We introduce environmental interfaces: designed environmental conditions that shape human-AI relationships through ambient, holistic, and evaluative pathways rather than explicit functional interaction. Using autonomous vehicle cabins as a revealing context, we conducted a within-subject experiment with 24 participants (216 observations), manipulating lighting and scent in a simulated autonomous driving environment. Three findings emerged. First, perceived atmosphere accounted for 66.5% of the variance in overall journey experience, showing that environmental conditions can function as an interface rather than merely a supporting design element. Second, multisensory processing followed a hierarchical architecture: individual sensory appraisals were initially independent, while cross-modal integration emerged during higher-order environmental evaluation. Third, olfactory stimuli influenced affective responses and experience evaluation more strongly than visual stimuli, challenging the visual dominance of automotive interaction design. Environmental quality and sensory congruency also predicted trust in the autonomous system, suggesting that passengers may use environmental cues as proxy signals when direct assessment of AI competence is difficult. These findings establish environmental interfaces as a distinct interaction modality and point to a broader transition from designing interfaces for operating intelligent systems to designing environments for inhabiting them.