AR DriveSim: An Immersive Driving Simulator for Augmented Reality Head-Up Display Research.

Joseph L Gabbard,Kyle Tanous,Bryan Jonas,Missie Smith,Hyungil Kim

doi:10.3389/frobt.2019.00098

Joseph L Gabbard, Kyle Tanous + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2019.00098

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Abstract

Optical see-through automotive head-up displays (HUDs) are a form of augmented reality (AR) that is quickly gaining penetration into the consumer market. Despite increasing adoption, demand, and competition among manufacturers to deliver higher quality HUDs with increased fields of view, little work has been done to understand how best to design and assess AR HUD user interfaces, and how to quantify their effects on driver behavior, performance, and ultimately safety. This paper reports on a novel, low-cost, immersive driving simulator created using a myriad of custom hardware and software technologies specifically to examine basic and applied research questions related to AR HUDs usage when driving. We describe our experiences developing simulator hardware and software and detail a user study that examines driver performance, visual attention, and preferences using two AR navigation interfaces. Results suggest that conformal AR graphics may not be inherently better than other HUD interfaces. We include lessons learned from our simulator development experiences, results of the user study and conclude with limitations and future work.

Highlights

While once the provenance of select academic and government labs, augmented reality (AR) has been applied in many contexts and delivered over a myriad of hardware technologies
The remainder of the paper describes the hardware and software technical implementation in detail, followed by a user study to demonstrate the utility of the driving simulator and concludes by presenting lessons learned from our multi-year endeavor creating and testing an AR head-up displays (HUDs) driving simulator
We conducted a mixed effects linear model which allowed us to account for individual participant differences as a random effect as seen in de Bruin et al (2008)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

While once the provenance of select academic and government labs, augmented reality (AR) has been applied in many contexts and delivered over a myriad of hardware technologies. In a design space that affords fundamentally different user experiences, we must pose the question: “How do AR HUD user interfaces that are necessarily visually integrated into a highly dynamic primary task space affect driver performance?” Driving simulators provide a method of rapidly iterating on AR HUD design in realistic driving scenarios without the danger or cost of on-road testing. To this end, this paper reports our experiences creating a relatively low-cost, full-scale driving simulator designed to examine AR HUD usage effect on driver performance and behavior. The remainder of the paper describes the hardware and software technical implementation in detail, followed by a user study to demonstrate the utility of the driving simulator and concludes by presenting lessons learned from our multi-year endeavor creating and testing an AR HUD driving simulator

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