Subjective Assessment of Commercially Common Input and Display Modalities in a Driving Simulator

Driving simulators could be valuable tools for better understanding human behavior while driving. The latter has the potential to guide the design of roads and vehicles. In addition, studies of driving habits can help gain insight into the relationship between human attention and locomotion. A critical aspect of a driving simulator involves the right choice of stimulus presentation and interaction methodologies. This paper presents a driving simulator study that evaluates a series of commonly used display and steering devices in terms of usability, physical and cognitive task load, and simulator sickness indices. Specifically, conventional large display, commercially available head-mounted display, and various steering devices were compared. Our study used two steering devices (stationary and wireless) and a gamepad controller to control the simulated vehicle. We hypothesize that using a Head-Mounted Display (HMD), although suitable for inducing immersion, might come with the cost of possible simulator sickness and a decrease in driving performance. We analyzed the individual and combined impact of display and steering input device types on our subjective metrics measurements. Our results proved our hypothesis on higher perceived immersion for HMD based driving simulator. Also, the paper highlights the trade-offs between big monitor setup and Virtual Reality (VR) in terms of workload and fatigue.