Towards CARLA VR: testing Head-up Displays in CARLA driving simulator

Head-up displays (HUDs) have attracted significant interest in the automotive industry due to their potential to improve driving safety and communication with the vehicle. Testing HUDs is a critical but difficult task, as a balance must be struck between the realism of the test environment and safety requirements. While an optimal test scenario would be a real-world environment with pedestrians and other vehicles, such conditions pose a significant safety threat. Therefore, immersive simulations based on Virtual Reality (VR) are often used to reduce these risks while creating a realistic test scenario. However, despite extensive research in HUD technology, there is a notable lack of standardized methodologies and tools for systematically evaluating drivers’ experience and interactions with HUDs. To address this limitation we propose to add such features to the CARLA driving simulator. This widely used simulator stands out for its open-source nature and collaborative platform that has attracted experts from different areas of automotive disciplines. The use of CARLA for testing HUDs in an immersive VR environment is still limited. This study aims to address this gap by presenting a proof-of-concept implementation within CARLA that emulates the HUD features documented in the existing literature and integrates them into an immersive VR experience. Preliminary experimental with vehicles of different Automation Levels (ALs) results confirm this approach’s feasibility and show CARLA’s effectiveness as a tool for testing in-vehicle HUDs and evaluating the overall quality of the simulator environment.