Abstract
Visual information reception plays a key role for anticipatory and safe driving. The majority of traffic related information is perceived by the driver´s optical sensory channel. Visibility conditions, as part of the active safety system, are competing with passive safety systems and other vehicle requirements. Therefore an efficient vehicle development process requires new methods of analyzing and improving visibility. On the one hand these methods should be capable in an early stage of product development; on the other hand they should enforce the attempts of vehicle manufacturers to reduce development time and costs. Especially the flexible combination of real vehicle components and virtual reality presentation – so-called “Augmented Reality” – promises great potential for improving ergonomic product design. Such a flexible AR-tool is developed to evaluate the circumferential visibility that enables users to interact with the virtual presentation by their natural body movements due to the application of a head tracking system. Furthermore the method´s anthropometric flexibility is ensured through an automated adaptation to different users’ body heights and seating positions.
Not only is the realistic visualization of a vehicle important to assess visibility conditions, also adequate virtual environments are required. Based on a methodical developed set of sight targets, common driving situations are represented in virtual scenes. These scenes extend the virtual representation of a vehicle and allow the assessment of visibility closer to reality. The validity of the “Augmented Reality” method is evaluated by a comparison of the (subjective) assessment results of the AR-tool, the traditional hardware seating buck (SB) and the final car (FC) for two sight directions (passenger-side and rearward visibility). No significant differences can be found, neither in terms of the common method (SB) nor concerning its actual objective, the assessment of future vehicles (N=18/15, p<0.05). Validity concerning forward visibility was already proven with a predecessor system without any head tracking system.
Unlike most analytical methods, the developed AR-tool makes visibility experienceable and forces arguments to keep up with exiting styling models and their competing effect on visibility conditions. Latest visibility assessments for design comparison studies have been conducted successfully using this AR-tool within the usual development process.
Keywords: Augmented Reality (AR), Visibility Assessment, Subjective Method, Vehicle Body Design, Development Time Reduction