Car simulation and virtual environments for investigation of driver behavior

The operator is required to be constantly vigilant and even more attentive when operating the device. The paper introduces a cooperation of a car simulator realized in virtual reality (VR) environments and measurements of "human driver behavior" focused mainly on aspects of HMI and drivers' attention decrease. In the first part a conception and a development of our VR car simulation devices is described. During the development of car simulators many problems need to be solved. One of these problems is represented by a simplification and a partial automation of a scenery creation. The first part is dedicated to algorithms used in our tools, which help to automate the creation of virtual scenes. The next part analyses in more details tools themselves and the rest of this section deals with demonstration of scenes, which were modeled using these tools. For simpler and faster generation of virtual sceneries it is suitable to store the models within a hierarchical database 3D object. Our database includes model objects from which subsequently forms surroundings for road virtual scenes. In the article it is described how to specify 3D model properties-their fundamental characteristic and consequent differentiation into specific categories. Sound perception cues are one of the most important ones besides the visual cues in the car simulation. The audio section of this article deals with simulating a sound of a car engine as a most significant audio stimulant for the driver. It shows basics of cross fading system which renders the car audio from multiple looped samples. First part contains analysis of car engine sound; the second describes how to synthesize it on the computer. A validation measurements and consequent results are shown at the end of this section. The final paragraphs shows examples of experiments developed for measurements of driver's fatigue and other aspects of driver's behavior.