DReyeVR: Democratizing Virtual Reality Driving Simulation for Behavioural & Interaction Research
This democratizes driving simulation for researchers by providing a low-cost alternative to expensive commercial systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing VR and simulation technologies.
The authors tackled the high cost and limited accessibility of advanced driving simulators by developing DReyeVR, an open-source VR-based platform that achieves similar visual fidelity for under $5000 USD, enabling affordable behavioural and interaction research.
Simulators are an essential tool for behavioural and interaction research on driving, due to the safety, cost, and experimental control issues of on-road driving experiments. The most advanced simulators use expensive 360 degree projections systems to ensure visual fidelity, full field of view, and immersion. However, similar visual fidelity can be achieved affordably using a virtual reality (VR) based visual interface. We present DReyeVR, an open-source VR based driving simulator platform designed with behavioural and interaction research priorities in mind. DReyeVR (read "driver") is based on Unreal Engine and the CARLA autonomous vehicle simulator and has features such as eye tracking, a functional driving heads-up display (HUD) and vehicle audio, custom definable routes and traffic scenarios, experimental logging, replay capabilities, and compatibility with ROS. We describe the hardware required to deploy this simulator for under $5000$ USD, much cheaper than commercially available simulators. Finally, we describe how DReyeVR may be leveraged to answer an interaction research question in an example scenario.