Effects of playing mobile games while driving

Abstract

The use of smartphones while driving is a growing phenomenon that has reached alarming proportions. Playing games is a particular type of activity performed by drivers on their smartphones and is the subject of this paper. The study that was con-ducted aimed at investigating the influence of playing games on a smartphone while driving in a virtual reality simulator. The driver’s eye glance behavior has been analyzed for twelve subjects while driving in two environments, city and country (national) road. A reference set of data obtained by driving without the gaming distraction has been used for performing a comparison and drawing conclusions. The results have indicated increased accident risks when playing games, especially caused by loss of control of the vehicle and improper lane positioning due to the driver being distracted by the game played.