Validity of Driving Simulator for Agent-Human Interaction

Drivers of intelligent agent in the virtual environment offer researchers a great opportunity to study interaction between drivers in the safe, controlled, replicable and low-cost simulator environment. However, the validation for the effectiveness of agent drivers upon human drivers is required. The present study aimed to evaluate the validity of agent-human interaction in a simulator, compared with human-human interaction on real roads. 20 male participants were recruited to watch eight scenarios concerning interactive driving behaviors and signal usage, which were presented in the forms of both realistic films with human drivers and virtual graphic scenes with agent drivers. Participants’ attitude, emotions and visual attention were recorded. The relative validity was established for all measurements. This result suggested that medium fidelity simulator with agent drivers could provide the effective values to evaluate the human-human interaction mirrored these values obtained on real road.