Eco-driving Feedback Gauge as visual Distractor : a simulator study

The ongoing development of electric vehicles brings with it new questions for human-machine-interaction research. Feedback devices in electric- and hybrid vehicles help drivers to understand the impact of their behaviour on the vehicle’s energy consumption, but are they a potential source of distraction? This study investigates that question by taking eye-tracking measurements of 20 university students with driver’s licenses in a virtual reality driving simulator. All participants drove a simulated electric vehicle in two conditions for 15 minutes each, once without and once with the feedback gauge on the dashboard. After the exclusion of ten participants due to motion sickness and errors in eye-tracking recording, the data was processed so that gazes and fixations to the dashboard were isolated. The dependent variables were the following: Time spent gazing at dashboard (in milliseconds and percentage of total gazes), number of gazes to dashboard, time spent fixating on dashboard (in ms and %), number of fixations on dashboard, and average fixation duration. A Wilcoxon paired samples test showed that the presence of a feedback gauge on the dashboard did not lead to significant differences for any of the variables. Therefore, the feedback gauge does not appear to be a distraction. Future research can build on both the findings and the methodology of this study to further investigate the visual aspects of electric vehicle driving.