A method is presented for enhancing the steering maneuvers of human drivers using peripheral visual information generated based on the vehicle’s lateral positions on the road. Human drivers control vehicles mainly using visual feedback information received from the road. However, such feedback may sometimes become degraded due to various reasons. On the other hand, recent advances in sensory technologies make it possible to detect vehicle behavior on the road quite stably. In this paper, we investigate a way to compensate such impaired feedback using artificial visual stimuli. A series of LED devices were installed in the car’s doors to display the stimuli. We designed three types of illumination patterns (flow, position, and width conditions) that react to the current lateral position of the vehicle. Simulated driving studies were conducted to evaluate the effect of each pattern on the driver’s control of the vehicle. As a result, we found that the presenting the artificial visual stimuli without explanation could significantly reduce inappropriate steering maneuvers in the degraded feedback situations.

Automated driving reduces the burden on the driver, however also makes it difficult for the driver to understand the current situation and predict the future movement of the vehicle. When the acceleration due to automated driving occurs without future prediction, the driver's anxiety and discomfort are increased compared to the case in manual driving. To facilitate the prediction of the future behavior of the vehicle by the driver, this paper aims to design and evaluate a haptic interface that actuates the vehicle seat. Our system displays to the driver the movement of the vehicle a few seconds in the future, which allows the driver to make predictions and preparations. Using a driving simulator, we compared the conditions where the movement of the car was displayed in advance for the length of different time. The subjective evaluation of the driver showed that the predictability of the behavior of the vehicle were significantly increased compared to the case without display. The experiment also showed that comfortable feeling significantly decreased if the preceding display is too early.

Contact imaging is a compact lensless microscopy technique that allows observation of living cells placed directly on a charge-coupled device sensor. However, captured images exhibit low visibility in general. This work is aimed at integrating computational refocusing and high-frequency illumination into contact imaging to enhance the visibility of the captured images. Refocusing contributes to the synthesis of shallow depth-of-field images from the light field captured by moving a point light source. The visibility may be enhanced via high-frequency illumination. Naïve integration of both techniques requires several observations. Therefore, we propose an efficient integration from reduced observations by reformulating the computational refocusing applied in contact imaging. Furthermore, we developed a prototype system that demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.