Recently in Driving Category
It has been a week since my last post. I was in Stevenson, WA (in the Gorge) for the 2007 Driving Assessment Conference. The conference was great, as was the setting. Before returning to the Portland airport (PDX), my travel companions and I headed to the world famous Powell's Books in downtown Portland. There were nearly as many books as there were tattoos in the joint.
I now have a week at home and work before heading out for a 7-night Eastern Caribbean Cruise with my wife. I'll do my best to post several times before next Saturday afternoon when we depart.
The new moleskine PDA worked well during the conference. I'll continue to post updates on my progress with the it.
BTW, any comments on the trial new blog name?
Here's a brief video (Quicktime required) of our new driving simulator in action. As noted before, the yaw (rotation) movement is a novel feature on a simulator this scale. I didn't have any students available to help me that morning, so I had to shoot it myself.
This video was shot with an iSight and captured with a demo version of iVeZeen.
Our new driving simulator at GMU is finally fully operational as of yesterday. It can now rotate 90º to the right and left, hopefully adding some strong motion-cues to participants when they turn. This feature is truly unique, let alone for a simulator this size. There's a small pitch-motion system as well to give drivers a sense of acceleration and braking feel.
A video of the simulator in action will be available soon. It's very cool! Now it's time to dive in with some experimental studies.
My lab got a short write-up in Mason's Gazette today. My student David and I did the photo shoot on Friday.
Many things, actually, but Cynthia and I drove by a car crash (note that I will never refer to them as accidents--I'll explain someday) scene this afternoon that was particularly painful to see. It was a head-on collision that evidently resulted from one car turning when the oncoming car didn't expect it. Based on the visible damage to each car, the airbags must have deployed, which means there were at least minor injuries. Though it was awful to see such a crash scene and I hope the injured are ok, that wasn't what was so painful about this incident. No, it was the fact that one of the vehicles, indeed the one with more damage, was clearly on a test drive from the dealership not 200 yards away. Ouch.
This situation begs the question of responsibility. Presumably the driver is responsible unless the dealership assumes responsibility for its vehicles on test drives. Anyone know?
