Tuning of the lateral specific force gain based on human motion perception in the Desdemona simulator

Abstract

Generally, motion simulators present motion and visual cues different from each other due to the physical limitations of the motion platform. Nonetheless, high fidelity motion platforms are capable of simulating some maneuvers one-to-one, i.e., motion cues equal to visual cues. However, one-to-one simulation is normally not preferred by subjects and the simulator motion is reported as too strong. In this study we investigated whether this overestimation depends on the frequency and amplitude of inertial motion. The stimuli in this study consisted of translations in the lateral direction. The Desdemona research simulator was used to generate the motion profiles. Six sinusoidal profiles with different combinations of amplitude and frequency were used as reference stimuli. For every experimental condition, the visual and inertial information had equal frequency but different amplitude. Subjects had to change the inertial motion amplitude until they obtained the best relation between the two sources of motion information. Our results showed that stimuli with high amplitude were associated with smaller motion gains than stimuli with lower amplitude. The same occurred for stimuli with higher frequency when compared to stimuli with lower frequency. The findings in this study suggest that a dynamic scaling algorithm for inertial motion could improve the perceived realism of motion simulation.