TravTek Evaluation Task C3 - Camera Car Study

The goal of the TravTek Camera Car Study was to furnish a detailed evaluation of driving and navigation performance, system usability, and safety for the TravTek system. To achieve this goal, an instrumented "camera car" was developed to provide comprehensive driving performance and behavior measurement capability. Six navigation test configurations were evaluated in the camera car study. These included: TravTek route-map display, TravTek route-map display with supplementary voice guidance. . TravTek symbolic guidance-map display. . TravTek symbolic guidance-map display with supplementary voice guidance. . Paper map. . Paper textual direction list. A primary finding of this research was that turn-by-turn guidance information (whether presented verbally, in a textual list or by a graphic display) enhances the performance, usability, and/or safety when compared with alternatives which provide holistic route information. For this study, the TravTek turn-by-turn with voice condition and a paper direction list (with a large legible font and similar in layout to a computer generated list found at some rental-car counters) provided the best overall performance. The TravTek turn-by turn without voice and route-map with voice conditions were comparable in many respects to these conditions, but did not perform as well with respect to driving performance and safety-related driver error. In contrast, the TravTek route-map without voice had the greatest overall impact on the driving task and was the least safe of all the navigation conditions tested. However, these safety differences are mitigated by user experience, and by driver selection of other available options (as shown in other TravTek studies). The paper map control condition was the least usable means of navigation in the study and resulted in substantially worse navigation performance than any other condition.