Assessment of Driver Attention during a Safety Critical Situation in VR to Generate VR-based Training

Abstract

Crashes involving pedestrians on urban roads can be fatal. In order to prevent such crashes and provide safer driving experience, adaptive pedestrian warning cues can help to detect risky pedestrians. However, it is difficult to test such systems in the wild, and train drivers using these systems in safety critical situations. This work investigates whether low-cost virtual reality (VR) setups, along with gaze-aware warning cues, could be used for driver training by analyzing driver attention during an unexpected pedestrian crossing on an urban road. Our analyses show significant differences in distances to crossing pedestrians, pupil diameters, and driver accelerator inputs when the warning cues were provided. Overall, there is a strong indication that VR and Head-Mounted-Displays (HMDs) could be used for generating attention increasing driver training packages for safety critical situations.