Behind the wheel of Ford’s distracted driving simulator

“It gave us a powerful reminder of the danger of taking our eyes off the road.

Everybody thinks they’re a great driver; distracted driving is something that happens to everyone else. However, plenty of research suggests this isn’t the case, and it only takes a few seconds of looking away from the road to get into trouble.

VIRTTEX, run by Dr. Mike Blommer and his team, is one of a handful of full-size vehicle motion simulators in the US car industry. It wouldn’t look out of place if the name on it read Boeing instead of Ford. I met Blommer along with Reates Curry and Radhakrishnan Swaminathan in VIRTTEX’s control room, which looks out at the simulator via a wall of windows along one side. Banks of monitors, computers, and control panels take up the other walls.

The participants for Blommer’s studies are recruited from Ford’s workforce, and the studies his group conducts usually involve between 20 and 100 volunteers, depending on how early a concept it is they’re testing and what kind of statistical power they need. “When we run studies, the first question I always ask is whether motion is important for what we’re looking at,” he said. “There are many simulators out there that don’t have motion, and they have their place, VIRTTEX has its place. We consider VIRTTEX to be a tool in Ford’s suite of tools. Some things are testable on test tracks, some on the road. When we’re getting people in here it may be safety related, or we may need motion to get a realistic response out of the participants.”

Fasten your seatbelt and keep your eyes on the screen as you change lanes to arstechnica.com/cars/ for the whole article.

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