# A VR Truck Docking Simulator Platform for Developing Personalized Driver Assistance
### Background and Previous Work  
Virtual reality technology has been applied in different areas of the automotive industry by diverse automotive manufacturers [10]. Marketing and sales are some of the application areas in which manufacturers explored the potential of VR technologies. For instance, VR environments that allow customers to configure a vehicle offer a more immersive and enhanced experience to customers. Additionally, the manufacturer benefits from a virtual showroom that saves resources such as space. Moreover, in the area of marketing and sales, the possibility to offer a virtual test drive was explored. The advantage here is that the automotive companies have a novel and powerful channel to advertise their product, even when the car is not yet released. In the application area of vehicle design, VR is used to support the development of the product. VR brings the advantage of improving the decision-making process and the product quality and it also allows rapid prototyping that might potentially reduce costs and the time-to-market. In line with the application of VR by different automotive manufactures, the research and development of novel concepts have also been explored with the support of VR platforms. In fact, VR simulators have recently been used in the development and evaluation of ADAS. A good example is the application of VR to training. Educating users to interact with automated systems is considered highly important [11; 12]. For example, learning about ADAS functionalities using a written manual has some drawbacks such as misinterpretation or forgetfulness. On the other hand, training in a real context might offer a richer and effective learning experience. However, there are not many automatic driving cars available for testing. Additionally, training drivers in a real setting is not risk-free: training drivers in some more dangerous scenarios (e.g., driver distraction) would be valuable, but such scenarios are naturally avoided. Hence, researchers explored VR simulators to train drivers. This provides drivers with the opportunity to have a safe and risk-free interaction with ADAS, promoting the experience of different scenarios such as the adaptive-cruise-control, or the automatic take-over request [13]. VR has several benefits: (1) prototypical traffic and environmental situations can be repeated as many times as necessary; (2) concepts such as a novel Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) approach can be simulated as digital prototypes and can be easily integrated into the VR simulation, saving time and money; (3) intensive tests with many participants might be executed, leading to valuable insights. In a recent study, researchers investigated the effectiveness of a light VR-simulator to train automated vehicle drivers by comparing it against a fixed-base simulator [13]. This light VR system, composed of a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) and a game racing wheel, proved to promote an adequate level of immersion for learning about ADAS functionalities and offered the advantage to be portable and cost-effective. Despite reinforcing the idea that a VR-simulator is a valuable tool for training purposes in automated vehicles, the results of this study also suggest that participants preferred the light VR system in terms of usefulness, ease of use and realism. Until now, researchers explored VR simulators and focused on the study of ADAS and automotive HMI on passenger cars. However, the literature has rarely mentioned VR simulators in the context of truck driving. Due to the increasing integration of ADAS functionalities in trucks, there is a necessity to find new ways of developing and designing ADAS for trucks. In a recent study, a light VR-simulator was used to examine different HMI designs with the intention to assess culture-related effects on the perception of and preference across German and Japanese truck drivers [14]. In this study, researchers highlighted that the light VR-simulator allowed the quick and efficient evaluation of HMIdesigns.