Seminar: Chantal Himmels, BMW

Driving simulators are among the most frequently used research tools in the automotive domain. The main reason for this is that driving simulators offer a highly controllable and inherently safe test environment. However, researchers usually aim to draw inferences about the real-world context based on driving simulator experiments. A necessary prerequisite for this is driving simulator validity, which refers to the correspondence of driver and vehicle/environment behavior in the driving simulator with that in the real world. There are various influencing factors towards driving simulator validity, and validity must be considered independently for differing driving simulators and use cases, rather than being a general simulator property. Throughout my PhD, I proposed a methodology for validating driving simulators, and conducted numerous subject studies including simulator comparisons as well as real-world studies. The results of my PhD will be presented briefly in this presentation.