Beyond the tracked line of sight - Evaluation of the peripheral usable field of view in a simulator setting

Abstract

Combining advanced gaze tracking systems with the latest vehicle environment sensors opens up new fields of applications for driver assistance. Gaze tracking enables researchers to determine the location of a fixation, and under consideration of the visual saliency of the scene, to predict visual perception of objects. The perceptual limits, for stimulus identification, found in literature have mostly been determined in laboratory conditions using isolated stimuli, with a fixed gaze point, on a single screen with limited coverage of the field of view. The found limits are usually reported as hard limits. Such commonly used limits are therefore not applicable to settings with a wide field of view, natural viewing behavior and multi-stimuli. As handling of sudden, potentially critical driving maneuvers heavily relies on peripheral vision, the peripheral limits for feature perception need to be included in the determined perceptual limits. To analyze the human visual perception of different, simultaneously occurring, object changes (shape, color, movement) we conducted a study with 50 participants, in a driving simulator and we propose a novel way to determine perceptual limits, which is more applicable to driving scenarios.

What Attracts the Driver’s Eye? Attention as a Function of Task and Events

“…A limitation of this work is the small horizontal field of view of 30 degrees, which prevents the use of peripheral vision-an important component of driving [64,65]. In comparison, the human visual field is about 200 degrees [66], meaning that drivers could infer moving objects from, e.g., the side windows [67]. The participants also could not turn their heads-something that drivers normally do [68].…”