6533b7dcfe1ef96bd1273191

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Visual scale factor for speed perception rendering in car driving simulation

subject

description

Speed perception is an important task that the driver must perform continuously to control his/her vehicle. It appears that many factors influence this perception: height of the point of view, field of view, realism of the environment, but also realism of audio and proprioceptive rendering. If some high-performance car driving simulators are able to render motion satisfactorily according to all these criteria, it is not always the case. As a result, speed perception is thus often under estimated, leading into producing higher speeds than in real conditions. Perceptual validity is then not good enough to study driver's behavior. To solve this problem, a technique has recently seen the light, which consists of modifying the geometric field of view while keeping the real field of view unchanged. This technique, quantified by a cue defined as the visual scale factor, is studied in-depth in this thesis. We particularly focused on the influence of this visual scale factor on speed perception and determined the existence of a linear relationship between the perceived speed variation and the actual visual scale factor. We have then determined in what extent it is possible to modify dynamically this factor in order to fit at best driving simulation needs. The experiments presented here have all been carried out on the SAAM dynamic driving simulator which has been designed, realized and tuned in the framework of this thesis.