APPROACH TO A SEMI-IMMERSIVE TOOL FOR RIDER SIMULATION TRAINING WITH AN APPLICATION FOR ROAD SIGN PERCEPTION

In recent years, especially in the city environment, the mobility demand has favoured the increment of the transport on two wheels. This increase is due to the small size of the motorcycle vehicles that allows both to fit easily in tight spaces and to guarantee a certain level of flexibility to the users in the congested traffic. In this trend higher attention must be paid on the training of future riders. So, the research work undertaken is devoted to give a possible solution for the problem by means of the study and the realization of a motorcycle simulator. The first step of the research, reported in this paper, has been focused on the study of the visualization system of the simulator. To improve the riding experience simulated the visualization system has been characterized by the tracking of an head mounted display (HMD) that permits to calculate the rotation of the user’s head and so of the point of view in the virtual environment, This has been initially used to conduct different tests in order to evaluate the user’s perception level of road signs. The test has been performed in two different environment (urban and rural) with different weather condition (sun, rain and fog) to modify the depth perception. The relative simple conditions of riding permit to ignore the ride ability of the user thus evaluating only the visual perception. Measuring the time perception and the number of perceived signs it was possible to demonstrate the efficiency of the tested visualization system despite of a traditional one like a monitor.