On the Objective Evaluation of Motion Cueing in Vehicle Simulations

Motion-based simulators are used for a variety of applications, such as research, education, entertainment and training. In fact, motion cues are required to achieve the highest regulatory certifications in training vehicle simulators. Nonetheless, the reproduction of self-motion cues presents technological and economic limitations that are not present in the generation of audiovisual cues. For this reason, the generated motion does not generally match the expected one. Therefore, it is necessary to define means to assess the suitability/fidelity of the generated motion cues. After more than 50 years of motion-based vehicle simulation, no mechanism has been universally accepted as the standard solution for the evaluation of motion cues. This paper reviews the mechanisms for obtaining measures of motion fidelity, focusing on those based on objective methods. Since the design of the Objective Motion Cueing Test in 2006, researchers have shown a renewed interest in identifying objective methods to evaluate motion cueing, as the number of works following this approach in recent years reveals. Objective motion fidelity systems allow also performing automatic tuning of MCA by means of optimization techniques, which addresses one of the other main problems of these algorithms. Nevertheless, a universally accepted objective method to assess perceptual motion fidelity in vehicle simulators has not been proposed yet. For this reason, this review work frames and classifies the existing methods. In addition, the authors propose a series of features that an ideal evaluation method for assessing perceptual motion fidelity should include and provide future research guidelines for this complex topic.