For safe driving, a driver should always keep eyes on the road and focus on surrounding circumstances. But many drivers still conduct activities unrelated to driving, such as using cell phones or eating while driving, which increases distraction and ...
For safe driving, a driver should always keep eyes on the road and focus on surrounding circumstances. But many drivers still conduct activities unrelated to driving, such as using cell phones or eating while driving, which increases distraction and traffic accident possibilities. Additionally, rapid development of IT technologies and vehicle electricalization have caused an increase in control factors while driving. Any activity that diverts attention from driving is defined as ‘distracted driving’, which could be categorized into 3 types: manual, visual and cognitive distraction. To reduce visual distraction, many vehicle OEMs apply voice recognition or voice guidance as an alternative input method, but this could potentially increase cognitive distraction rather than decreasing visual or manual distraction.
This experiment implements Detect Response Time (DRT), which is one of the distraction measurement methods, using Virtual Reality (VR) and the experiment task involves selecting an item from a 5-item lists. The task is designed 2 types and 3 ways, find the name or navigation POI with address from visual information, auditory information and a combination of visual and auditory information. Then, compare each task response time with visual information task.
According to the result, simple information such as name, visual accompanied with auditory information can decrease driving distraction than visual only. However, selecting complicated information such as navigation POI, have high driver distraction in all cases.
This study provides a driver distraction guide for use of visual and auditory information, by testing similar in-vehicle circumstances using VR. It could also serve as reference for designing user interfaces that involve visual and auditory information.