Emergency situations during car driving sometimes force the driver to make a sudden decision. Predicting these decisions will have important applications in updating risk analyses in insurance applications, but also can give insights for drafting autonomous vehicle guidelines. Studying such behavior in experimental settings, however, is limited by ethical issues as it would endanger peoples' lives. Here, we employed the potential of virtual reality (VR) to investigate decision-making in an extreme situation in which participants would have to sacrifice others in order to save themselves. In a VR driving simulation, participants first trained to complete a difficult course with multiple crossroads in which the wrong turn would lead the car to fall down a cliff. In the testing phase, obstacles suddenly appeared on the "safe" turn of a crossroad: for the control group, obstacles consisted of trees, whereas for the experimental group, they were pedestrians. In both groups, drivers had to decide between falling down the cliff or colliding with the obstacles. Results showed that differences in personality traits were able to predict this decision: in the experimental group, drivers who collided with the pedestrians had significantly higher psychopathy and impulsivity traits, whereas impulsivity alone was to some degree predictive in the control group. Other factors like heart rate differences, gender, video game expertise, and driving experience were not predictive of the emergency decision in either group. Our results show that self-interest related personality traits affect decision-making when choosing between preservation of self or others in extreme situations and showcase the potential of virtual reality in studying and modeling human decision-making.
Traditional optical manufacturing poses a great challenge to near-eye display designers due to large lead times in the order of multiple weeks, limiting the abilities of optical designers to iterate fast and explore beyond conventional designs. We present a complete near-eye display manufacturing pipeline with a day lead time using commodity hardware. Our novel manufacturing pipeline consists of several innovations including a rapid production technique to improve surface of a 3D printed component to optical quality suitable for near-eye display application, a computational design methodology using machine learning and ray tracing to create freeform static projection screen surfaces for near-eye displays that can represent arbitrary focal surfaces, and a custom projection lens design that distributes pixels non-uniformly for a foveated near-eye display hardware design candidate. We have demonstrated untethered augmented reality near-eye display prototypes to assess success of our technique, and show that a ski-goggles form factor, a large monocular field of view (30o×55o), and a resolution of 12 cycles per degree can be achieved.