With funding from the Department for Transport’s Transport Researchand Innovation Grant (TRIG), the Driving Change team have created and tested a mixed reality approach to driver education. Working closely with James Evans,who has extensive experience and expertise in virtual reality for road safety, wehave designed and tested a mixed reality approach to driver education and research, developing an immersive experience which allows drivers to safely experience the effects of their own distraction, with a view to changing future behaviour.

Based on this work, we have created an open box toolkit ofmixed reality resources which can be applied to multiple areas of road safety,including workplace training, driver education and academic research.

Project Achievements

The project led to the creation a mixed reality environment that leverages video pass-through technology to test and train drivers interactively. We created both 360-degree video and CGI virtual driving environments. The novelty in our design is the mixed reality approach. Our testing demonstrated the ability of our selected technology to personalise the vehicle environment, allow the user to engage effectively with their own mobile phone, and to interact with a virtual environment which closely resembles real-world experience, without any issues of user discomfort and high ratings for immersion and realism. The ability for the user to interact with both the real and virtual worlds simultaneously provides huge potential in terms of research,training and educational applications. The potential impact of a mixed reality approach to driver education is far reaching, not only for the policing and deterrence of offending by the general public, but also for educating industry and public sector fleets and other groups of professional drivers, improvingroad safety for everyone.

Findings

This project has demonstrated clear proof of concept by assessing technology and devising a workable approach for testing and training. Paired with psychological expertise, based on empirical investigations on both the distraction imposed by phone use, behaviour change interventions, and best-practice in policy, this project provides a solid grounding for development of a range of mixed reality road safety training, education and research approaches. The toolkit we have produced, sharing the development process, provides jargon-free guidance on the creation and application of mixed reality approaches.

You can access the full final report of this work here

You can find the associated Toolkit for this project here