Representation Of Drivers Research Articles

Visual occlusion method is a visual demand measuring technique which uses periodic vision/occlusion cycle to simulate driving environment. It became one of the most popular techniques for the evaluation of in-vehicle interfaces due to its robustness and cost-effectiveness. However, it has a limitation in that the vision/occlusion cycle forces the user to use the IVIS at a predetermined pace, while a driver decides when to use the device on his/her own in actual driving. This paper proposes a user-driven visual occlusion method for measuring the visual demand of in-vehicle interfaces. An experiment was conducted to examine the visual demand of an in-vehicle interface prototype using both the existing (system-driven) occlusion method and the proposed (user-driven) one. Two in-vehicle tasks were evaluated: address input and radio tuning. The results showed that, for the radio tuning task, there were significant differences in total shutter open time and resumability ratio between the methods. The user-driven visual occlusion method not only allows a better representation of drivers' behavior, but it also seems to provide more information on the chunkability of a task.