UFTI intern and rising 3rd-year student Omar Rivera shared with us some interesting facts about his research, preliminary inferences and a little about his background.

Rivera is a computer science major whose main interest is aerospace engineering. He is from Houston, Texas, and recently finished his AA at San Jacinto Community College. He will start at the University of Texas at San Antonio this fall. He is at UF participating in a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Exchange for Undergraduates (REU.) Rivera chose this option because he wanted to gain experience outside the classroom, and an REU seemed like the best option to do so, he explained. Having friends in Florida made accepting UF’s offer an easy choice.

Rivera has been working with UFTI Ph.D. student Bryce Grame on secure, accessible and sustainable transportation. This topic was outside his field, so, he did have to do a lot of reading to catch up and be able to contribute in a meaningful way, Rivera explained. He has been analyzing eye-tracking footage that was recorded by other students over Spring break during a pilot study called “Eye-Tracking Applications for Transit,” and more specifically, he has been tasked with finding any inconsistencies in roundabout design considerations of transit vehicles.

The study utilized BeGaze software and SensoMotoric Instruments and takes about 30-45 minutes per driver. The drivers wear glasses and there is a camera for each eye and one camera on the nose looking out to capture what they are looking at.

Although each video was about 15-20 minutes long, it took Rivera about seven hours per video to collect the data needed. To do this, he “frames” their gaze data in the BeGaze software. This means he makes Areas of Interest (AoI) in the software, and he had to make one for each object they wanted to analyze. He then lined up the boxes for every frame of the video. At a 30 frame-per-second (FPS) recording speed, that meant he had to work through about 20,000 frames in each video. The AoIs calculate how often the driver looked and for how long.

Some questions Rivera considered include:

• Are bus drivers having to make conscious efforts to avoid collisions while navigating the roundabouts – collisions with signs, curbs, other vehicles, pedestrians, etc.?
• Are the roundabouts designed within FDOT guidelines, and are transit vehicles included in the design process?
• Where are the bus drivers focused on during the roundabout and for how long?
• Are bus drivers acknowledging roadway signs and/or looking for pedestrians at crossings?

The goal is to submit a paper to the Transportation Research Board (TRB) and finalize Grame’s report to the Federal Highway Administration (FWHA.) Rivera explained that for now, any conclusions are tentative, but preliminary inferences suggest that transit vehicles were included in the design plan and no conflicts exist on the roundabouts they observed. The roundabouts being studied are located north and south of the Cade Museum in Gainesville, Florida on Main Street.

When Rivera isn’t tracking transit drivers’ eyeballs, he enjoys walking around Gainesville. He says, “Houston is massive and built for cars, unlike here where there are bike trails and high visibility pedestrian crosswalks.” Another bonus of spending time in Florida, there’s a lot more nature here, and he enjoys seeing the variety of animals.

Ada Lang
UFTI Communications Specialist