Evaluating the Applicability of GUI-based Steering Laws to Virtual Reality Car Driving: A Case of Width-Changing Paths

For a proper car navigation system, it is necessary to model the level of driving difficulty according to the road geometry. As for curved paths with constant width, Yamanaka et al. verified that steering-law-based models for predicting the speed and time needed to perform GUI tasks, can be applied to models of driving difficulty. Incidentally, changes in road width, such as chicane and lane narrowing, make it more challenging to travel along the road. Therefore, we designed narrowing and widening roads of different widths and conducted experiments on a driving simulator to investigate how road width changes affect driving difficulty. As a result, the most appropriate model for the movement time had adjusted 𝑟^2 value of 0.9736. Our results also indicated that reflecting the difference between widening and narrowing is not important to make the model more accurate when the task is easy to some extent.