Influence of Familiarization with a Driving Course Upon Driving Behaviors in a VR Driving Simulator and its Properties

This manuscript discusses how familiarization with an experimental driving course in a driving simulator would influence driving behaviors in terms of manipulation of the gas/brake pedal, ability to stay in one's lane, and driving speed. Generally, when conducting an experiment using a driving simulator to gain new findings, an experimental driving course is required and the influence of familiarization with the course affecting the results is inevitable. Traditionally, to remove this influence of familiarization with driving courses from a targeted evaluation criterion, predictable driving courses such as straight-based roads like city roads and expressways, roads with gentle curves like country roads and mountain ones, are employed. However, it is still questionable whether findings from those driving courses would hold for variation of driving courses which play an important role in understanding the findings in reality. This manuscript focuses on the progress of familiarization with a driving course and clarifies what properties of driving behaviors are influenced from it. The findings show that people control speed of a car with fewer presses of the acceleration pedal (the number of counts of pushing the gas pedal decreased by -11.6%) with less pressure applied (degree of pushing decreased by -12.8%), leading to driving more slowly as they drive around 7 similar to 9 driving laps. In addition, they manipulate the steering wheel with a smaller operating range (standard deviation of angular position of the steering wheel decreased by -5.7%), so that lane keeping becomes more precise (lateral deviation decreased by -28.7%) as they drive around 4 similar to 6 driving laps. Finally, user familiarization with driving courses is dealt with in this manuscript and our ultimate goal is to quantify user familiarization, predict its level, and give drivers feedback on it in real time so that they are warned to be drive carefully. The outcome of this manuscript is a first step and quantify the user familiarization.