Development of an Augmented Reality Vehicle for Driver Performance Evaluation

Observing drivers' behaviors by reproducing traffic accidents and conflict situations is important for developing advanced driver assistance systems. For this purpose, driving simulators are frequently used to evaluate the effectiveness of driver assistance systems during product development. However, motion (simulator) sickness can be a serious practical problem with driving simulators. Therefore, an instrumented vehicle, the JARI-ARV (Japan Automobile Research Institute-Augmented Reality Vehicle), was developed to reproduce realistic traffic accident and conflict scenarios without endangering the driver. In this study, we examined level of control in the following cases: a right turn and encounter with a pedestrian by comparing the JARI-ARV with a standard (unaltered) same model vehicle. Results of the experiment indicated that drivers tend to react to virtual traffic participants in the same way as driving a standard vehicle. The study indicates that the JARI-ARV can play a useful role in human factors research.