Assistive Illumination, Light-Dynamics and Expected Driver's Perception

Abstract

As humans depend heavily on visual awareness, at night, lighting is the most important “as-sistance” for the driver. Caused by various available technologies with somehow segmented light sources, light-induced dynamics are identified as a rather new contribution to the scenery perceived by the driver. The effects of such dynamics are not yet understood and should be addressed in the context of visual at-tention and eye movements. Understanding the ef-fects of light-induced dynamics will open a route to shift from unintended, technically originated effects imposed by headlamp-product characteristics, to-wards intentionally designed dynamic effects to sup-port beneficial driving behaviour. This will be enabled by highest resolution headlamp technology. We com-pared two adaptive lighting systems, one causing pro-nounced, the other one subtle light-induced dynam-ics. Preliminary results indicate that pronounced light-induced dynamics elicit more eye movements com-pared to subtle light-induced dynamics. Possible in-terpretations and further research methods are dis-cussed.