Advanced driving simulators aim at rendering the motion of a vehicle with maximum fidelity, which requires increased mechanical travel, size, and cost of the system. Motion cueing algorithms reduce the motion envelope by taking advantage of limitations in human motion perception, and the most commonly employed method is just to scale down the physical motion. However, little is known on the effects of motion scaling on motion perception and on actual driving performance. This paper presents the results of a European collaborative project, which explored different motion scale factors in a slalom driving task. Three state-of-the-art simulator systems were used, which were capable of generating displacements of several meters. The results of four comparable driving experiments, which were obtained with a total of 65 participants, indicate a preference for motion scale factors below 1, within a wide range of acceptable values (0.4-0.75). Very reduced or absent motion cues significantly degrade driving performance. Applications of this research are discussed for the design of motion systems and cueing algorithms for driving simulation.

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The goal of the present study was to explore how simulator motion cuing affects the driver's control performance of a car. Steering behavior was used as a measure of control performance. The experimental task was a slalom maneuver in which the velocity of the car was limited to 70 km/h. Subjective and objective variables were measured. The paper describes the objective steering behavior. The slalom task was driven under four conditions in which the lateral motion scale factors were 1 (one-to-one lateral motion), 0.7, 0.4, and 0 (no-motion), respectively. In total, 16 participants completed the experiment. The study showed that the motion condition affects the steering wheel behavior. The general tendency is that less steering correction took place when the magnitude of the motion cues was increased, which was quantified by two performance indicators. First, the number of steering wheel reversals was reduced when the motion cue magnitude was increased. Second, the amount of relatively high-frequency correction was reduced with increasing motion cue magnitude. It is concluded that motion feedback can improve the driver's control performance in an extreme scenario such as a slalom maneuver. Therefore, the effect of motion on control performance must be considered when a driving simulator study addressing control performance is designed.