The influence of immersive driving environments on human-cockpit evaluations

To ensure safety and usability of advanced in-car cockpit solutions, prospective evaluation during early prototyping stages is important, especially when developing innovative human-cockpit-interactions. In this context, highly realistic test environments will help to provide reliable and valid findings. Nevertheless, real car driving studies are difficult to control, manipulate, replicate and standardize. They are also more time consuming and expensive. One economizing suggestion is the implementation of immersive driving environments within simulator studies to provide users with a more realistic awareness of the situation. This paper discusses research investigating the influence of immersive driving environments. We evaluated three interaction modalities (touch; spin controller; free-hand gestures), and two levels of immersivity (low; high) to examine this methodology. Twenty participants took part in the driving simulator study. Objective and subjective data show advantages regarding situational awareness and perception for high immersive driving environments when interacting with a navigation system.