Assessing the contribution of active somatosensory stimulation to self-acceleration perception in dynamic driving simulators.

In dynamic driving simulators, the experience of operating a vehicle is reproduced by combining visual stimuli generated by graphical rendering with inertial stimuli generated by platform motion. Due to inherent limitations of the platform workspace, inertial stimulation is subject to shortcomings in the form of missing cues, false cues, and/or scaling errors, which negatively affect simulation fidelity. In the present study, we aim at quantifying the relative contribution of an active somatosensory stimulation to the perceived intensity of self-motion, relative to other sensory systems.

Metagenomics Analysis to Investigate the Microbial Communities and Their Functional Profile During Cyanobacterial Blooms in Lake Varese.

Toxic cyanobacterial blooms represent a natural phenomenon caused by a mass proliferation of photosynthetic prokaryotic microorganisms in water environments. Bloom events have been increasingly reported worldwide and their occurrence can pose serious threats to aquatic organisms and human health. In this study, we assessed the microbial composition, with a focus on Cyanobacteria, in Lake Varese, a eutrophic lake located in northern Italy.

A safety score for the assessment of driving style.

Objective: Road traffic laws explicitly refer to a safe and cautious driving style as a means of ensuring safety. For automated vehicles to adhere to these laws, objective measurements of safe and cautious behavior in normal driving conditions are required. This paper describes the conception, implementation and initial testing of an objective scoring system that assigns safety indexes to observed driving style, and aggregates them to provide an overall safety score for a given driving session.

Efficacy of augmented visual environments for reducing sickness in autonomous vehicles.

The risk of motion sickness is considerably higher in autonomous vehicles than it is in human-operated vehicles. Their introduction will therefore require systems that mitigate motion sickness. We investigated whether this can be achieved by augmenting the vehicle interior with additional visualizations.