The Impact of Simulation Modes on Acquiring Spatial Knowledge through Augmented Reality Landmarks on Windshield

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) has emerged as a promising means to visualize landmarks for wayfinding or spatial learning. The work presented at the last symposium shows that displaying AR landmarks on windshield can be an effective way to support traveler’s spatial learning in autonomous vehicles, using simulation consisting of recorded real-life driving video and added AR landmarks in an experimental setup. As the previous experiment setup was completely online, this current study intends to investigate the ef-fects of different modes of simulation on the outcome of spatial learning. This study carries out two additional experiments, one of which is an in-person experiment using the same video-based simulation. The other experiment adopts a different simulation which is completely virtual using the head-mounted display. This study intends to compare the acquired spatial knowledge and eye-tracking measures through all three experimental setups and participant’s interactions. As these three experiments represent the com-monly used modes of driving simulation, an additional contribution of this study is to compare the effectiveness of different modes of simulations for experiments involving simulations of AR displays on windshield.