Prediction of Drivers' Eye Location

Abstract

The set of guidelines for establishing the location of drivers' eyes as a function of a vehicle's workspace geometry and percentile representation of driving population is one of the most important design tools in the automotive industry. This tool is called an Eyellipse which allows designers to minimize structures that interfere with a driver's vision to his environment. The Eyellipses were, however, based on data gathered while subjects were in a static laboratory setting looking straight ahead at a picture of a driving scene instead of a real driving task. The objectives of this paper are threefold: (1) to examine literature that has laid the foundations for current automotive design standards on drivers' eye location, (2) to describe models for predicting drivers' eye location, and (3) to determine significant factors that should be used in these models by re-analyses of raw data from previous studies. This discussion also indicates weaknesses in previous research and proposes areas where future research is needed in order to determine the true distribution of subjects' eyes during a real driving task.