Attention-attracting Facilities Utilizing Vection

Abstract

In an attempt to prevent excessive increases or decreases in speed when driving motor vehicles, Central Nippon Expressway Company Limited (hereinafter referred to as “C-NEXCO”) is currently conducting research on controlling a driver’s sense of speed, etc., by installing light-emitting devices on highway shoulders at regular intervals and by regulating their emission of light according to an arbitrary light-emitting pattern. Research results on the control of speed utilizing light-emitting devices have been accumulated. Regarding conventional research to urge drivers to regulate their traveling speed by drawing their attention or guiding their lines of sight to blinking or the turning on of light-emitting devices sequentially placed along potentially dangerous road areas, one issue of difficulty concerned responding to excessive traveling speed caused by becoming “acclimatized” to the speed and any excessive decrease in speed during sagging road section. In this paper, as an effort to control the sense of speed utilizing the perception of self-motion induced by visual sensation (hereinafter referred to as “vection”) and as a focus on taxis that move in response to the stimulus of light (hereinafter referred to as “phototaxis”), we would like to report on a basic examination conducted through a questionnaire experiment using CG simulation images and the actual effects thereof, as verified in experiments on actual roads conducted using an expressway under construction (based on the examination results).