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Audi's 25th Hour is a self-driving car test lab

German automaker's autonomous car cabin simulator studies how people will react to self-driving tech.

Chris Paukert
Following stints in TV news production and as a record company publicist, Chris spent most of his career in automotive publishing. Mentored by Automobile Magazine founder David E. Davis Jr., Paukert succeeded Davis as editor-in-chief of Winding Road, a pioneering e-mag, before serving as Autoblog's executive editor from 2008 to 2015. Chris is a Webby and Telly award-winning video producer and has served on the jury of the North American Car and Truck of the Year awards. He joined the CNET team in 2015, bringing a small cache of odd, underappreciated cars with him.
Chris Paukert
Audi's 25th Hour Project autonomous car lab
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Audi wired up 30 millennials to see how they react to different stimuli to enhance future self-driving cars.

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A basic cabin is surrounded by windows featuring integrated displays, as well as a larger, room-sized array of screens that simulate driving in a self-driving commute.

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Participants were wired with EEG caps and GSR sensors to measure their responses.

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Scientists varied including background noise levels, light, and so on to gauge subjects' reactions.

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Audi believes massive levels of in-car advertising are a given in our self-driving future, and it views its cars as a membrane to filter out things occupants don't care about.

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This isn't creepy at all.

Nope.

(Apparently special liquids are used to enhance the brainwave-measuring EEG cap's connectivity).

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GSR finger sensors are applied.

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Test subjects were tasked with simple brain tests that included answering questions, memorization drills and so on.

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It's easy to imagine that this will look absurd when self-driving cars become commonplace years from now.

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Audi worked with the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart on this research.

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Continue clicking or swiping through for more images of Audi's 25th Hour project.

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At the laboratory experiment at the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart the galvanic skin response was measured (GSR).

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Fraunhofer Institute experts on human-machine interaction measure brain activity (EEG)

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