%0 Journal Article
%T Comparing Expert Driving Behavior in Real World and Simulator Contexts
%A Hiran B. Ekanayake
%A Per Backlund
%A Tom Ziemke
%A Robert Ramberg
%A Kamalanath P. Hewagamage
%A Mikael Lebram
%J International Journal of Computer Games Technology
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/891431
%X Computer games are increasingly used for purposes beyond mere entertainment, and current hi-tech simulators can provide quite, naturalistic contexts for purposes such as traffic education. One of the critical concerns in this area is the validity or transferability of acquired skills from a simulator to the real world context. In this paper, we present our work in which we compared driving in the real world with that in the simulator at two levels, that is, by using performance measures alone, and by combining psychophysiological measures with performance measures. For our study, we gathered data using questionnaires as well as by logging vehicle dynamics, environmental conditions, video data, and users' psychophysiological measurements. For the analysis, we used several novel approaches such as scatter plots to visualize driving tasks of different contexts and to obtain vigilance estimators from electroencephalographic (EEG) data in order to obtain important results about the differences between the driving in the two contexts. Our belief is that both experimental procedures and findings of our experiment are very important to the field of serious games concerning how to evaluate the fitness of driving simulators and measure driving performance. 1. Introduction There is a growing interest to use simulators for educational and training purposes by using traditional entertainment oriented and personal computers based gaming platforms, which are commonly referred to as serious games£¿£¿[1¨C3]. For instance, according to SWOV£¿£¿[4], about 150 driving simulators were used for basic driver training in 2010 in the Netherlands. Although driving simulators bring many advantages to driver training, such as safe practice environment and unlimited repetition, there is a question of validity, that is, whether the competence or performance obtained in the simulator is valid in real world driving. To our knowledge, little research has focused on this question (e.g., [5]) because of reasons such as the risk of testing the skills in the real world, higher costs and efforts required in such research, and methodological weaknesses. Addressing this problem, this research has evaluated the equivalence between driving in the real world and driving in a simulator at two levels of enquiry: by using performance measures alone and by combining psychophysiological measures with performance measures. For our investigation, we involved experienced drivers and collected data about both real world driving and driving in a mid-range driving simulator. The data were gathered in various
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijcgt/2013/891431/