Headlight Glare Simulator for a Driving Simulator 2.0

In this paper, we would like to introduce a second generation of headlight glare simulator to be used with a driving simulator that significantly improves spatial and brightness accuracy of previously developed prototype headlight glare simulator (Fullerton & Peli, 2009). The system combined a programmable off–the-shelf LED display board and a beamsplitter so that the LED lights, representing headlights of oncoming cars, are superimposed over the driving simulator screen. Although the early prototype headlight glare simulator proved the feasibility of the concept, it required precise spatial arrangement of optical components to avoid misalignments of the superimposed images. Due to the spatial limitations of the driving simulator, this ideal set up is hard to achieve in practice and the use of a 2-dimensional beamsplitter plate inevitably introduces parallax. Furthermore, the driver’s viewing position varies by driver based on the driver’s height and seating position preferences, and this exacerbates the misalignment. In order to minimize the resulting parallax errors, the new glare simulator we report on here has an intuitive calibration procedure (simple drag-and-drop alignment of nine calibration dots on the screen) which defines a set of mapping coefficients for each driver and reduces overall parallax error. In addition to the improvements of spatial synchronization, in order to simulate the dynamics of headlight brightness changes during nighttime driving, a new LED intensity control algorithms based on headlight and LED beam shapes were developed and validated.