Ford's Distraction Lab Plays with Goggles

Believe it or not, making a driver keep his/her eyes on the road has developed into a science of its own, with all the required laboratories and scientists. With so many distractions in today's vehicles, including GPS, trip computers, rear view camera monitors and the nagging wife on the right, Ford found it useful to dedicate an entire team to the task of making the driver keep the eyes on the road.

Called Ford's Human Machine Interface Verification Laboratory, long-boring name for Distraction Lab, the team is trying to find the causes and effects of distracted driving. To that end, they use high-tech goggles, fitted with sensors which can detect when a driver takes his/her eyes off the road.

Ford used occlusion as the main tool, with the test subjects wearing goggles equipped with LCD screens. They rapidly blink open and closed in a preset sequence, while the test subject keeps his/her eyes on a GPS screen, for instance. The open position represents the time the driver keeps the eyes off the road, while the closed one the time with the eyes on the road.

"Occlusion testing is faster and a lot more efficient than other methods for determining eyes-off-road time and the potential for visual distraction," John Shutko, Ford Human Factors and Ergonomics specialist said.

"In the past, we used occlusion testing primarily to verify other research, but over the past couple of years we've been able to develop test models with the technology that allows us to rapidly complete research faster than ever before."

So, what did they find? According to the data, at least 85 percent of the subjects were able to understand the information on the GPS screen in the time given.

The main goal of the research is to create technologies which will allow the driver to keep his/her eyes on the road as much as possible. For features which cannot be understood in the required time, an off function, which will disable it while the car is in motion, will be added. No info yet available on whether such an off function for the nagging wife has been created...