EVALUATION OF DIFFERENT FEEDBACK AND REPRESENTATIONS OF AN IDEAL TRAJECTORY IN A DRIVING SIMULATOR

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this study was to develop some kind of feedback in a driving simulator aimed at helping drivers in following the ideal trajectory and let human testers use it, in  order  to  analyze  which  feedback  is  best  perceived,  and  if it is  also  the  one which allows the drivers to follow the ideal trajectory. The project implemented two different representations  based  on  theories  from  traffic  research  which  was  compared  in  an experiment  with  29 subjects.  The  first  representation  is  a  drawn  trajectory  and  the second one uses drawn points near the tangent point. This  work  is  based  on  a  driving  simulator developed  for  a  previous study using  the Unity3D  engine.  Furthermore,  the  driving  simulator  is  developed  on  a  low-cost hardware infrastructure. The  test  subjects  generally gave  a good  feedback  on  the  simulator as  a  whole  and analysis of the data, even if biased by a mean high speed caused by a general low speed perception,  shows  a  clear  pattern  in  which  the  use  of  drawn  trajectory  leads to performances closer to the ideal trajectory. This representation has also been valuated as  better  in  the questionnaire,  and  hence  from  the  available  data  it  seems  possible  to say  that  this  kind  of  feedback  is  better  perceived  and  leads  to  better  performances compared to the other one.