Driving Around the Bend: Eye Tracking for Curve Navigation
You’ve likely seen a car commercial in which the driver is stealthily navigating a rural road with sharp twists and turns. How do they do that? Where do they look? A recent article at Physorg.com notes that it is well documented that when negotiating winding roads, a driver typically looks at a specific and well-defied point on the lane marking. This is known as the tangent point. But new research shows that the further a driver looks ahead, particularly in left-hand curves, wide curves, and when coming out of a curve, they have to look less frequently at the tangent point. When a driver enters a right-bound curve, they tend to see fewer roadways ahead and therefore spend more time on the tangent point.
The findings were recently published in the Journal of Vision in an article entitled “Car drivers attend to different gaze targets when negotiating closed vs. open bends.” For the study, researchers had six drivers test-drive a car repeatedly through a series of 12 right and left turns and curves. The study was done on real roads, and the participants had their eye movements recorded for the exercises. As a driver moved into a curve, the research showed that they would rely heavily on using the tangent point before turning the steering wheel. Drivers were shown to look at the tangent point 80 percent of the time when there was a shorter sight distance – say, on a sharp, right-hand turn. In an open bend like a left turn, as well as when leaving a curve, drivers would spend a third of their time looking at the end of the curve and at the straight road that comes after.
It’s important to note that the study was conducted in right-hand traffic, as typical in the United States and continental Europe.
The researchers say there are many hints that suggest the results can also be used to predict how a driver negotiates a curve in left-hand traffic. “The system we envision will look out for upcoming curves and retrieve information about the eye movements the driver normally performs,” said the paper’s author, Farid I. Kandil of the Department of Psychology, University of Münster, Germany. “If the driver does not show his typical pattern of eye movements upon approaching a bend, then the system will assume that he has not seen it and will warn him in time.”
The article says that the team is planning to conduct more experiments involving a prototype to determine whether the warning system provides enough time for a driver to react properly.
Eye movements and sight distance reveal how drivers negotiate winding roads
Related articles:
- Biometric Devices: Can An Electronic Driving Coach Make Safer Roads?
- Eye Tracking: Driving Simulation for U.S. Army Training
- Driving Blind? Eye Tracking Study Shows Cell Phones Cause Inattention Blindness
- Sleepy Driving and the Eye Tracking Fix
- Inexpensive Eye Tracking Device to Detect Drowsy Driving
- Eye Tracking: Evaluating Teen Driver Distractions
- Steering a Car With Eye Tracking is the Future
- Texting While Driving Apps: Helpful or Harmful?
- Eye Tracking Research Advances With Gaze Probing
- Using Eye Tracking & Mouse Movements to Analyze Search Behavior