Motion sickness remains challenge for autonomous driving
Many car travelers have already experienced it: While the driver steers the car unperturbed over the winding country road, the passengers are often overcome with an unpleasant nausea, especially if they sit in the back seat or against the direction of travel, or if they watch a video or read while driving. “Travel sickness is a major challenge for the development of autonomous vehicles,” says Heinrich Bülthoff, Emeritus Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen (Germany). “When we think of closed cabins, which in the future will serve as a sort of mobile office to make good use of travel time, we have to solve this problem”.
What exactly the causes of motion sickness are has not yet been conclusively clarified. According to a common theory, the cause could be a sensory conflict: The vehicle’s movement and the expectation of it – what we see, for example – do not match. According to this theory, it should help to give the occupants in the vehicle as precise information as possible about the impending movement – acceleration, curves, braking and so on. For Bülthoff and his team, the question therefore arose as to whether better visual information could help to solve the problem as far as possible.
The researchers asked volunteers to take a seat in a driving simulator. The passengers were transferred to a virtual vehicle through Virtual Reality headsets and were given optical simulations of a driving route. In a refined version of the experiment, clouds of moving light spots on the sides and floor of the vehicle served to provide additional optical information about acceleration, deceleration and curves.
However, the result was sobering: “In our simulations we observed no relief from motion sickness,” says Ksander de Winkel, first author of the study. “In any case, there was no positive effect beyond what could be achieved by just looking out the window.”
For the researchers, this can mean two things: Either passengers need additional sensory information about the route, which also includes other senses, such as acoustic signals or vibration changes. Or it is necessary to consider the possibility that the previous assumptions about the origin of motion sickness are incomplete and that the nausea is due to other causes.
Heinrich Bülthoff also sees these results as a message to the designers of autonomous vehicles for the development of such vehicles: They must consider smooth driving behavior as one of the development goals. “Politicians and top managers often work in a moving car,” says Bülthoff. “But they usually have exceptionally well-trained chauffeurs, with a highly anticipatory and therefore very calm driving style.” In addition, he believes that when developing autonomous vehicles, it will always be necessary to ensure sufficient visibility to the outside – especially in the direction of travel. “And if, instead of taking the highway, the car travels along a winding route, the occupants will probably not be able to avoid closing their computers and files and looking forward out of the vehicle onto the road”, he said.
More information: https://www.cyberneum.de/2760/en
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