The study
An academic project asking a question that has only got more relevant since: as windshields become displays, where can you actually put information without degrading the driving?
The apparatus
The car ahead oscillates in depth continuously, so the driver has to keep attending to it rather than parking their gaze somewhere convenient. In the original this was a ping-pong along the depth axis with the range exposed as a tunable parameter.
At intervals the lead vehicle brakes and its lights go red. Time from that moment to the driver's key press is the measure. Everything else in the apparatus exists to make that number mean something.
Heads-up elements appear a few times a second at positions drawn from the condition being tested. They are the load: realistic in kind, and controllable in where they sit.
The original ran with a head-mounted eye tracker, so gaze could be compared against the reaction times. That is the part a browser cannot rebuild, and the recordings are not published here.
What this rebuild changes
The original ran in VR with a headset and an eye tracker, in a lab, with participants. None of that transfers to a web page, so this rebuild keeps the parts that carry the argument — the oscillating lead vehicle, the brake events, the widget spawner, and eccentricity as the thing you control — and drops the parts that would be theatre without the hardware.
It also means the numbers you see are yours. There is no stored dataset behind this page, no participant results, and no claim that your reaction times reproduce the original findings on a keyboard rather than in a headset.
On the original data
The eye-tracking recordings from the original sessions were captured on a university lab's equipment and show the lab and the people in it. They are not mine to publish, so nothing from them appears here — no video, no gaze traces, no participant numbers.