Simulation Driven Experiment Control in Driver Assistance Assessment

Embedded systems technologies and advances in micro electronics have accelerated the evolution of driver assistance systems towards more driving safety, comfort, entertainment and wayfinding. With the technological and quality progress, however, also goes the growing of interaction complexity, information overload, and intricate interface designs. Assessing interaction designs for in-car assistance services is an emerging and vibrant field of research. To avoid situations of possibly fatal danger when assessing driver assistance services in real driving situations, we propose trace-driven simulation to steer the experiments with users in a automotive driving simulator. Based on our own developments of driver assistance systems involving the sense of touch, i.e. exploiting haptics as a communication channel in vehicle-to-driver interactions, we demonstrate how pre-recorded traces of driving situations can control user studies. Our experiments show, that simulated driving journeys is a viable alternative to the more hazardous "on-the-road" user studies. With respect to haptics as an additional channel of communication we find that vibro-tactile stimuli are a promising means to raise driver attention when the visual and auditive channels fail due to overload.