Investigating Drivers’ Awareness of Pedestrians Using Virtual Reality towards Modeling the Impact of External Factors

Situational awareness of the driving environment is crucial for making safe and informed driving decisions. It can be deteriorated by distractions or environmental properties such as low light. In order to study and model the effects of environmental, perceptual, and behavioral features within the binocular field of view on the drivers’ awareness of pedestrians, an experimental setup consisting of a Virtual Reality (VR) based driving simulator, data generation, and analysis solution has been developed. An experimental study was conducted to evaluate the developed setup and analyze drivers’ awareness of pedestrians in the context of varying external conditions. Results show that driver awareness can be measured from the properties of eye tracking and a secondary detection task to detect pedestrians. It is demonstrated how this research aims towards developing more human-aware driver monitoring systems with assistive functionalities such as attention guidance, taking perceptual and cognitive factors into account.