Enhanced Presence in Driving Simulators Using Autonomous Traffic with Virtual Personalities

The paper summarizes a project to increase the sense of presence within a driving simulator while interacting with autonomous trafŽc. The project sought to model natural variations in ambient trafŽc to emulate identiŽable driving styles for different categories of driver. Probability distributions combined with decision histories were employed to characterize speed choice while providing a mechanism for introducing temporal and spatial variation in speed changes. These efforts produced “virtual personalities” representing different categories of ambient trafŽc including generic, male, female, old, drunk, aggressive, cautious, and fatigued. A user evaluation of the ambient trafŽc concluded that naturalistic variation in behavior can signiŽcantly contribute to the subjective realism of the interaction with trafŽc simulation.