How do you get people to trust autonomous vehicles? This company is giving them 'virtual eyes.'

One of the biggest challenges facing car companies developing driverless vehicles has little do with sophisticated robotics or laser technology. Instead, they must figure out how to engineer something far more amorphous but no less important: human trust, the kind that is communicated when human drivers and pedestrians make eye contact at a crosswalk. Surveys indicate that large portions of the public harbor deep reservations about the safety of self-driving technology, so Jaguar Land Rover enlisted the help of cognitive psychologists to unpack "how vehicle behaviour affects human confidence in new technology," the British automaker said in a news release. Its solution for answering that question: virtual eyes, a large cartoonish pair that bring to mind the plastic googly eyes you probably glued onto projects in elementary school. The eyes have been fitted to autonomous vehicles known as "intelligent pods."