Study of FACE Design, Lighting System Design for Enhanced Detection Rate of Motorcycles

The FACE (Facial Attention for Conspicuity Enhancement) design, a lighting system design that enhances motorcycle conspicuity with regard to the detection rate from the view of a driver at night, is described in this paper. Past research has shown that there is part of the human brain that reacts to the image of a face and the idea was developed of a method to enhance the detection rate of a motorcycle by incorporating the element of a face in the front design of the motorcycle. The effect of a simple FACE design, a reverse triangular arrangement of lamps, is evaluated and its effectiveness is shown. Moreover, a simulation method was developed that could be used to evaluate the enhanced detection rate of a FACE design motorcycle under conditions that are close to some real traffic environments. The method is evaluated by comparing it with the results of a full-scale test and demonstrates the method could be used to evaluate the detection rate of a motorcycle. The full text of this paper may be found at: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/esv/esv21/09-0406.pdf For the covering abstract see ITRD E145407.