EP 84 | William Messerschmidt | Vision, Perception & Human Factors

Vision, Perception & Human Factors | EP 84 | William Messerschmidt 
 
William Messerschmidt is a former police officer and traffic homicide investigator. After serving the City of Auburn with distinction for 8 years, Mr. Messerschmidt left government service to work with the late Dr. Edward L. Robinson where his work was focused on the investigation and analysis of commercial and heavy vehicle crashes. While working alongside the physicists and engineers at Robinson & Associates, Bill was introduced to Dr. Jeffery Muttart and almost immediately went back to school for the study of Human Factors Psychology and Engineering. Since that time, Bill has studied Human Factors, focusing on transportation and industrial safety, at the University of Idaho, Emory-Riddell Aeronautical University, and The University of Aberdeen. Today, Bill’s Accident Reconstruction work is primarily focused on applying Human Factors science to the analysis of traffic crashes and industrial accidents. Join us as we discuss the importance and function of vision, perception, and human factors in forensics.

Originally aired on: May 11, 2023

Transcript

00;00;27;26 - 00;00;49;27
Eugene
Hey everyone, it's Eugene here. And welcome to Forensics talks. This is episode 84, and my guest today is William Messerschmidt. Let me bring up my notes here and we are going to get started. So, my next guest is William Messerschmidt, and I met him just a few weeks ago at the WREX conference in Orlando. And we were just talking before.

00;00;49;27 - 00;01;06;13
Eugene
But before I say anything else, I do want to congratulate all the people who helped to organize the event. It was a great conference. The crash day on the Tuesday was fantastic. I mean, there's nowhere else I've ever been. Well, where you could turn your head and see one crash going on. And then 15, 20 minutes later, another one and then another one.

00;01;06;16 - 00;01;31;00
Eugene
It was really overwhelming. But the organizers did an absolutely fantastic job. Everybody worked hard that week. And there was a lot of commitment to making the event a success. So, hey, congratulations, everybody. I certainly enjoyed it. And I managed to catch William's presentation. And so, it was on desperate cameras and human vision. And so, William Messerschmidt is a former police officer and traffic homicide investigator.

00;01;31;06 - 00;01;55;26
Eugene
And after serving with the city of Auburn with distinction for eight years, William left the government service to work with the late Dr. Edward L Robinson, where his work was focused on the investigation and analysis of commercial and heavy vehicle crashes. Now, while working alongside physicists and engineers at Robinson and Associates, Bill was introduced to Dr. Jeffrey Mutasa, and almost immediately he went back to school for the Study of Human Factors, Psychology and engineering.

00;01;56;01 - 00;02;23;05
Eugene
I will point out that we did an episode with Geoffrey MyChart, so you can catch that. If you look back into YouTube, just do a search and you'll see it. So, since that time, Bill studied human factors and he's focusing on transportation and industrial safety at the University of Idaho, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and the University of Aberdeen in 2022, Integra Forensics was founded when Mr. Schmidt Safety Consultants welcomed Ms.

00;02;23;05 - 00;02;57;22
Eugene
Olivia Normand as a new partner. Now, William’s accident reconstruction work is primarily focused on applying human factor science to the analysis of traffic crashes and industrial accidents. But as a company, Integral Forensics provides services related to accident construction, human factors, analysis, forensic video and audio analysis and regulatory compliance. Today, what we're going to be talking about is vision and perception and how that is important, whether it's for traffic accidents, whether it's for, you know, police shooting cases, for industrial type of accidents and things like that.

00;02;57;24 - 00;03;07;21
Eugene
I think it has a lot of merit in many, many different areas and not just limited to, you know, traffic accidents. So let me bring him in here. There he is. Hey, well, how you doing?

00;03;07;23 - 00;03;20;28
William
Hey, doing well Eugene, Thanks for having me on. And let me just first echo what you said about how great and how well organized the rights conference was and my gratitude to those organizers and volunteers as well.

00;03;21;00 - 00;03;42;12
Eugene
Yeah, it was just a fantastic week. I was really I mean, like most people I saw, everybody was saying the same thing, like, we're here for a week and we're busy. Like everyone's talking. And with that many people together, you know, it was just actually well, one thing was it was nice to meet a lot of the names that, you know, that you've known from before and just you have, you know, met face to face before.

00;03;42;12 - 00;03;57;20
Eugene
So that was kind of cool. But yeah, I really enjoyed it. So, and I'm glad that I caught your presentation, which I have to say to you, you know, thanks for I just kind of stopped you and said, hey, man, like, this is what I do. I have these forensics talks thing. Like, would you be willing to jump on in?

00;03;57;20 - 00;04;02;08
Eugene
And you said, Yeah, sure. So, I was like, Cool. So, thanks. Thanks for being here.

00;04;02;10 - 00;04;09;06
William
Yeah, absolutely. I knew who you were. So, you were one of those people I got to meet and appreciate you having me on. Jane.

00;04;09;08 - 00;04;24;07
Eugene
Right on. I want to ask you a little bit regarding your background. So, I mean, you were in, you know, working with the police. Was that something that you had in your mind from the beginning, like you want to be a police officer or like, what? What, what how did what was your path there?

00;04;24;09 - 00;05;05;04
William
But so not really. I guess I probably left for university with one day. There was one thing I was definite about, and that was I didn't want an indoor job under fluorescent lights. I think my first declared major was something in agriculture, forestry. So ultimately though, I studied economics and I really enjoyed that field for a lot of the same reasons that I enjoy human factors by the time I'm getting ready to graduate and I've been working my way through school, I realized that the career progression through economics is exactly what I didn't want.

00;05;05;04 - 00;05;27;03
William
It's indoors, under fluorescent lights and the opportunity to serve as a police officer was there. Lots of my family had served in the United States Army, so a little bit of similar background there. Fathers, uncles, great grandfathers and so I just I went ahead and dove into law enforcement.

00;05;27;05 - 00;05;43;00
Eugene
Oh, nice. And while you were with law enforcement, I mean, you were doing traffic accidents and things like that. I mean, we're going to be talking about human factors today, but how much of human factors made up what you were doing with the police?

00;05;43;02 - 00;06;23;26
William
Very little, you know, at that time. Yeah. This is mid-nineties. At that at that time, there, there hadn't been much crossover between human factors science, engineering, psychology and traffic crash reconstruction. It's really Dr. Mazar, along with Dr. Olson before him that created that bridge between existing research that's going on in the human factors’ world at places like the University of Michigan and all of us on the crash side that were just blissfully unaware that anything was even being done.

00;06;23;28 - 00;07;08;17
William
And it's not till Olson publishes this paper and kind of cross publishers between HFCS, human Factors and ergonomics Society and the society of Automotive Engineers in 1984 and 1986, that really the Canada the world in jet crash reconstruction world in general for the wakes up to it and then and that's the only thing and it gets used and abused and Dr. Richard has lectured spoke taught written also himself did you know hey this wasn't this was one test not a universal constant like gravity then then just doctor these are kind of, I think, completed that bridge building that Paul Olson had started.

00;07;08;19 - 00;07;16;16
Eugene
I have to ask you, what made you leave the police? I mean, a lot of people that get into policing don't leave. They stick it out. So, yeah.

00;07;16;18 - 00;07;44;11
William
It was a really it was a really tough call for me. I loved it. But I honestly, I was at home, all of my crosses and the phone rang, and it was Dr. Robinson and I'm this voice straight uniformed patrolman. 5% of my job is still to write parking tickets. And here's this guy who worked for of the Pinto crashes and written papers on the phone asking me if I want a part time job.

00;07;44;13 - 00;08;18;05
William
And there was no way I can say no to that. And you know that a year later, he knew full time work. My ex-wife had finished graduate school at Auburn and was I had been offered a teaching job in one of the universities in Birmingham. So, it just it made sense. And it was one of those yeah, I hate to quote my least favorite footballer of all time, but you know, a little bit of a hand of marathon on a little bit in the hand of God, you know, although it is a little bit more married, honest and maybe in my case, a little more out of the hand of God.

00;08;18;05 - 00;08;27;01
William
But it was it was just one of these times where you got to make a decision and I took the risk and I'm here with you today.

00;08;27;03 - 00;08;34;10
Eugene
Yeah. Cool. And then so you were working privately for how many years before you sort of went out on your own.

00;08;34;12 - 00;09;07;22
William
Um, you know, as luck would have it, as wonderful as it was to work with Dr. Ed, he was already retired from Birmingham, University of Alabama. Birmingham and retired from Stanford University as professor of physics. And within a couple of years of me getting there, he's retiring, retiring. And I just, you know, business sales and transitions, you know, going back to that econ background, I had I had no confidence that I'd be the guy that got to hang around and sort of jumped to another company that didn't work out.

00;09;07;24 - 00;09;26;05
William
And as a stopgap, I thought a couple of clients can probably get the mortgage paid for six months till we find a new place to live and get my daughter in a new school. And, you know, six years later, I get the partners in four years, and it's gone pretty well.

00;09;26;07 - 00;09;56;09
Eugene
Well, let me ask you about the whole human factors thing. And, you know, like you just mentioned, like in the nineties or, you know, with policing, it wasn't something that was really taken into large consideration. And so in your mind, is the have you seen a transition or was there a point where you can say, yeah, you know, during these few years people started to really switch their thinking and, you know, the paradigm shift a little bit into more of human factors, like what is that like for you?

00;09;56;12 - 00;10;32;29
William
So I would really that, that if I could attribute it to one specific thing, it would be Dr. Mutants 2003 essay for the analysis of perception response time quantification based on that analysis and there's probably two years 03205 where as we typically are as human beings are quite resistant to change, but as the truth that different stimulus equals different response starts to win out, that's where I think the focus shifted.

00;10;32;29 - 00;10;52;16
William
So maybe, maybe oh five and moving forward, it's more widely acknowledged even for people who maybe disagreed with some aspect of Japanese arts research that, okay, well, he's got a point which we believe he certainly has some very, very good points.

00;10;52;18 - 00;11;11;19
Eugene
Yeah. And I mean, it's a complex subject and there's been I know there's been like a little bit of I don't say controversy, but there's like things about and I want to ask you about this, too, about 1.5 seconds and like sort of people pinning things down or trying to paint everything with a very, you know, with one brush and calling it what it is.

00;11;11;19 - 00;11;33;08
Eugene
But there's a very complex set of considerations you have to take when we talk about human factors and how people how we see how we, you know, how our brains work, how we react to the external conditions and things like that. So, I mean, what did you see as some of the early problems with the way people were treating like the whole human factor?

00;11;33;08 - 00;12;00;25
William
Science was, I think, the first I really became aware of how broad the scope of the problems in our industry was. When I started graduate school at the University of Idaho through their engineering outreach. And I went to my advisor boy, Dr. Brian Dyer, and said, I'd like to do my project this term on poll and forensic aspects of driver response.

00;12;00;28 - 00;12;28;29
William
And Dr. Dyer looks at the book and he says, well, that's getting into this is like a capstone project you need to finish, you know, advance human factors and human factors, engineering applications, the human computer interaction before you start reading this. And I thought, wow, you know, I've had engineering psychology research methods and cognitive science perception and sensation and he's like, I'm ready for this, you know?

00;12;29;00 - 00;12;50;09
William
And I had, you know, and it was a student to that. This is the intro that a lot of people are getting then this all that stuff about learning in behavior of visual perception. Because at the end of the day, human factors are it's so much such a broader field, bigger field than just PR, you know, it's the Greek word.

00;12;50;09 - 00;13;29;01
William
Ergonomics is the science of work, and it's been a little bit more broadly defined than that as the way human beings interact with the human made environment. And there's a whole lot more interactions and influences on our interaction from the environment than just that emergency PR to you when someone blows a stop sign in front of us. And so just kind of stepping back from Jeff's due to Jeff's research and saying, wow, human factors, applications to traffic safety and crash reconstruction are like much, much, much broader than this.

00;13;29;03 - 00;13;36;18
William
And we've got to start learning more about them and trying to apply these principles methodologically and scientifically.

00;13;36;21 - 00;13;56;17
Eugene
How do you break apart like the because it's so broad, like I'll take a stab at it and I'm going to miss something probably. But for example, for me, I see that there is like external factors, extrinsic factors which the environment, the weather, like all those other things which cause difficulty with the way we can perceive or interpret or whatever.

00;13;56;21 - 00;14;27;17
Eugene
And then there's sort of like the mechanics of the like our eyes and the, the biological function of how we see. And then I would say even there's the, the software part of the brain and the processing and stuff and kind of what goes on in your head. And then there's sort of another aspect that I see, which is all the research and the validation that goes into putting people in different scenarios and looking to see, you know, you know, how average and 95th percentile or how people perform under certain conditions.

00;14;27;17 - 00;14;37;00
Eugene
But and that may be a rather crude break out of certain things. But I'm just curious, how do you how do you keep it organized in your head?

00;14;37;03 - 00;15;05;18
William
You're not far off. I think what I would change is that that the picture's a good bit bigger, potentially and broader even than that. If you look at the books that James Risen, Sydney Packer Younes Rasmussen have written about human doctors and accident investigation, you saw it was the human right here. And they'll extend out to, you know, to the workplace environment, to the social, cultural environment.

00;15;05;20 - 00;15;44;16
William
You can broaden that spectrum of it just about without it without a limit. But yeah, at the at the level of the human it is, I would add to what you said, your learning experience of the, the learning and behavior side of it, conditioned and unconditioned learned responses are conditioned and learn responses. You have that and then you have the context in which the operator is doing things including, like you said, whether roadway environment, signage and then you have sort of the bigger picture.

00;15;44;16 - 00;16;32;08
William
Beyond that, you have employees who are specifically incentivized to work harder with longer hours and push themselves beyond a safe limit. That that is part of the environment, too, doesn't come into litigation for crash reconstruction. It's as much. But it's a it's a big picture of you working your way down to the smallest aspects, like how much reflected light, how much luminance do you need to excite the photoreceptors and then your brain to interpret that correctly as contrast with the background and then to understand that contrast with the background Again, now you're maybe reading a little bit on learning experience that's a pedestrian or that's a dog running out in front of me.

00;16;32;10 - 00;17;08;06
Eugene
Yeah, that's a that's an interesting point. So, the, the things which affect people's ability to see well obviously one has to be lighting, you know, how dark or how bright the environment is obviously in very dark conditions or foggy or whether that has to be a factor. But, you know, you mentioned contrast, right? So that's something else that can affect how well we see what other things are there that can cause problems with, you know, the actual ability to see things.

00;17;08;08 - 00;17;47;20
William
So, anything that reduces contrast, either color contrast or under low light conditions that we're usually concerned with and then crash and industry brightness contrast. So anything that that blurs those lines, but then other things that help us detect the presence of an object or size and motion, those are those are two big lots of and you know so if you're developing a model for, you know, visibility or recognition, those are two factors that you have to at least consider.

00;17;47;22 - 00;18;07;28
Eugene
Let me ask you about the how people see you, because during your presentation, this is one of the things that I found pretty interesting, which was, you know, the fact that, well, part of your presentation was comparing, you know, video or a camera and then to how people actually see, which is not the same. And one of your points was there's you can't reproduce it.

00;18;07;28 - 00;18;27;22
Eugene
You can't say that this is exactly what somebody saw or the way that they saw it. So can you explain a little bit about human vision and like what areas we focus on, what we detect in terms of like motion and field of view, all that sort of thing. Like if you had to summarize that, how you do take a stab at it.

00;18;27;25 - 00;18;47;26
William
Sure. What if we start out with the very central part of our vision, the closer in to right in front of you, you are your vision. That's where your best color vision, your best detailed vision, anything you ever had to do with something really small. And you got it right in front of you, either directly in line with your US.

00;18;47;29 - 00;19;15;26
William
So that's where you from? Your vision is central vision. And then as we go out from there that we lose the clarity, we lose the clarity pretty quickly by different people have different numbers. But you know, 1 to 5 degrees is the clearest. And then we're out to ten. And, you know, maybe a normal gaze is 20 or 30 degrees depending on what type of research you're looking at.

00;19;15;29 - 00;19;38;11
William
And then but as we go out and our vision is less detail rich and less, we're less capable of seeing color, we become more and more dependent on the rods, which the rods in our eyes as opposed to the cones. Cones are all stacked up in the middle, giving us that color and detail vision rods or the rest of our eyes going back.

00;19;38;13 - 00;19;53;02
William
They're giving us monochromatic light sensitivity and they're also giving us motion sensitivity. So, although the image is getting blurry or we're getting a relative advantage in terms of motion and brightness.

00;19;53;05 - 00;19;58;22
Eugene
So, when you talk about motion, the motion is something that is typically wider.

00;19;58;24 - 00;20;28;12
William
But we have our so the this the most sensitive motion receptors are the crown, are the rods and they're just orfs. They're offset just a few degrees again and get heavier in the periphery. So, by the time you look like your peripheral vision, just rods detecting motion, you know, right out here, not very difficult. And you can detect this motion, but you can't see it clearly.

00;20;28;15 - 00;20;40;18
Eugene
Right. You can't tell what the heck it is. But, you know, you know, something is moving and that that sounds like something some kind of like a natural adaptation of humans or, you know, hundreds of thousands of years probably for good measure, whatever. Yeah. If you want to know something's coming at.

00;20;40;18 - 00;21;02;16
William
You, you want to know, you know, prey animals have like the horses, their eyes are on the sides of their head. They have the ultimate. Yeah, peripheral vision. And then you look at predatory animals, you know, wolves, dogs, cats. Their eyes are like ours. They're in their, you know, in the front. Yeah. To see what they're going after.

00;21;02;18 - 00;21;23;13
Eugene
And then so let's talk about look. So, we're looking we do the certain areas that we see or whatever, and then obviously they get into the eyes. They're, they're, they're converted so that our brains can understand what happens internally. You know, when let's say, for example, let's say a person actually see something, whether it's a cat dog or an animal, that's, you know, all of a sudden pop out on the roadway.

00;21;23;16 - 00;21;33;17
Eugene
What is what process is going on sort of biologically in the brain and then back to the body in order to avoid a mishap?

00;21;33;19 - 00;22;08;23
William
Well, so we're we pick up on some cue, whether it's whether it's the motion or the color contrast or words. Yes, we see the object. We're fortunate. We see it right there in our clear vision. We know what it is. We know that it's moving. We have the situational awareness to sort of predict the outcome as being something that if I don't change my trajectory, what we've got to do is fixate on that, identify it.

00;22;08;25 - 00;22;39;22
William
And that's going to take, you know, this combination of the rods and cones of. So, we're going to we're going to look at it. And then because our central vision is so small, we're often going to need to make more than one fixation. And those that those two characterizations are happening 3 to 4 times a second. And to some extent, they're going to be the pattern over them, although it's happening subconsciously, is a learned behavior in and of itself.

00;22;39;24 - 00;23;20;01
William
So, the other paper by Dr. Muter, he looked at inexperienced drivers versus experienced drivers and the visual search patterns were different. They were thinking about it consciously and controlling the movements of their eyes with conscious thought. But the experience drivers were looking more efficiently, farther ahead, where novice drivers were looking right in front of them. If you sat and watched a sporting match with someone who really knows it or played it and you noticed that they're looking at different things than you are, you know, you didn't see the foul and don't even know what happened.

00;23;20;07 - 00;23;47;02
William
And they know, oh, you know, well, you know, that was a cleat up tackle from behind or that was a holding on the offensive line. Like how did they see that? It was because their visual search pattern is trained to go to the specific places because of their experience, just like the experience drivers. So now we hope that we have some experience that's beneficial to us as the, you know, machine operator, industrial worker driver.

00;23;47;02 - 00;24;10;02
William
Same things can apply to pilots or train operators, anyone else, so that we efficiently determine what this object is and what the pattern it should mean and that's only going to give us you see only about 20% of what we quote unquote see is coming from our eyes to the other 80% occurring in our brain.

00;24;10;04 - 00;24;16;28
Eugene
Wow. So, it's like being filled in for yeah, for the for the for the context of everything else.

00;24;17;00 - 00;24;46;27
William
Right. Because we have, we can't possibly search the entire theoretical field of view that we have with these aquatic movements. So, our brain is literally filling in the gaps with what it thinks. It's there. And what was their last time? Yeah, there'll be probably more than just me. Has put their cell phone down somewhere and gone looking for it and looked exactly where like looked on top of the coffee table where the phone was not seen it and then go on toward the bedroom apart from back out.

00;24;46;27 - 00;24;57;14
William
And so, the cell phone right there where you just look for it because you didn't get your central vision on it and your brain filled in the blank coffee table that it thought was there.

00;24;57;17 - 00;25;20;11
Eugene
Oh, man, I never done that before, huh? Yeah. Okay, we'll skip through that one. Let me show something. This is something you did at your presentation, and I thought it was kind of cool, and I'm just press play here, but it's you kind of explain how we see. And so, I don't know if you can just describe this this particular video that you put together.

00;25;20;14 - 00;25;49;11
William
So what we did was when we took a photo that we purchased for my stock and our forensic animator and I sat down, we based the visual we based the clear area on a paper research that was done by some scientists at the University of Liverpool who are trying to develop augmented reality or augmented vision techniques for people with particularly glaucoma, where they're their peripheral vision is degraded seriously.

00;25;49;13 - 00;26;12;18
William
And I'm trying to show how do those occasions start to still in the picture. And Greg and I kind of came up with sort of a generic route. Where would you look? Well, if you lifted your head up and open your eyes and you saw this human form in the middle of you, people are drawn to people's faces from the time we're very young.

00;26;12;20 - 00;26;33;03
William
So, you'd probably look to the goalkeeper space, and we're drawn to motion. So, you probably look for the ball and then you start filling in and you see edges of the of the soccer goal and you start to fall, follow straight lines at edges so that your brain can hopefully fill out this picture. So, this is just idealized.

00;26;33;03 - 00;26;59;21
William
And you know, for example, if my son's a high school goalkeeper is his goalkeeping coach, if we put eye tracking on him and he watch this, he'd probably be looking at very different things than a soccer fan. He'd be looking at hip position and hand position and thumb position and all these details, and the rest of us are just trying to see if the ball is going to go in the dirt or if it's going to go over the post.

00;26;59;24 - 00;27;19;05
Eugene
You bring up an interesting point, though, because you said, you know, like we go to faces and things like that first. So, you know, if you're driving down the road and there's a pedestrian that comes in or let's say you're an officer and you know you're in a difficult situation or something, and then, you know, somebody pops up from around the corner, your eyes are drawn to that person or human immediately.

00;27;19;07 - 00;27;30;04
Eugene
But what about when it's something you're not expecting or something that is difficult to interpret? I think I can see that causing all kinds of issues with trying to figure out what the heck is that you know.

00;27;30;06 - 00;27;55;02
William
Right. And no, it really is. And that's where experience and training come in for, you know, for police, you know, for military units that need to do, you know, close quarters work. You have to look at hands and you have to look at hips. And, you know, facial expression is somewhat is much less important to an officer in a potentially critical incident than what is in the suspect's hand.

00;27;55;04 - 00;28;13;09
William
And you have to train yourself to, you know, through practice and experience and, you know, the some of the better training in virtual reality that that's been used to get people to look at the important stuff.

00;28;13;11 - 00;28;32;14
Eugene
Okay. I was going to ask you about this anyway, but Stanley here from South Africa has asked us, so I'm going to bring it up here. Yes. What is your response? Anyone making a claim typically in court that the internationally accepted perception reaction time for a driver is 2.5 seconds or 1.1. 5 seconds, etc...

00;28;32;17 - 00;28;57;23
William
So, the first thing I would say is accepted by who, which I think is a major news arts response as well. But what I what I like to do, and I do this in the courses that I teach is just break it down for people. You're driving home on the freeway tonight and you're in that sort of pre rush hour traffic where traffic zipping along close to the speed limit.

00;28;57;23 - 00;29;25;16
William
But if you tried to leave a lethal following distance between yourself and the vehicle in front of you, three cars would jam their way. And if the brake lights on the lead vehicle come off and it takes you a second and a half to put your foot on your brake, you've already hit a Clearly there are response times that are much faster than a second and a half.

00;29;25;18 - 00;29;52;16
William
You know and imagine whatever ridiculously complicated scenario you want to a tree falls in front of you when wind blows over a billboard, or a deer becomes a parent on the side of the road. Really, you can do that in one half seconds. You should be, you know, playing football, some in the English Premier League or, you know, flying fighter planes for your military.

00;29;52;19 - 00;30;26;20
William
If you're that fast under those really very difficult to comprehend scenarios that are very unlikely to happen. And if you can get people to think about the fact that with every other stimulus sound like instructions, different stimulus, different response, there's a reason fire alarms are loud because you need to reach a certain level to alert people and to really let them know this is bad.

00;30;26;22 - 00;30;58;29
William
Go, please leave the building now. You could never have you know, just a quiet. Hey, Eugene, there’s there might be a fire at your office like, no, no less would never do that. They start giving you something with verbal commands. Very definite out. And then it's supplemented by the super annoying, very loud, high decibel pressure beeps. So, like, what else in your life do all the different stimuli create that exact same response and the same amount of time?

00;30;59;02 - 00;31;39;23
William
Nothing. You can't anything. And if you can just break people away from that. And so, what? We just need to look at different scenarios and look at what affects response time. Then people I think, have an easier time grasping this and are and I think the biggest resistance that I saw this with. Yes. You know, really early on before he was doctor meets are if you could make people understand the potential simplicity of this analysis, that you can break these down into three or four types of crashes and four or five important variables.

00;31;39;26 - 00;32;14;13
William
And if you just look at those, you're going to get pretty close. You're going to get a pretty good distribution. There's there may be times and reasons what you need to look deeper, and you need more expertise to get to a to a tighter level even than that. But it really isn't that difficult. I think people saw those regression equations and they were just so blown away that they there's an infinite number of possibilities of different crashes and different lighting levels and they get overwhelmed and then they just could not cope with life.

00;32;14;15 - 00;32;22;27
William
It's just that that's, that's where we stop because otherwise, I am, you know, it's not like I can figure out.

00;32;23;00 - 00;32;41;08
Eugene
Yeah, I mean you had a video that I watched where it's a deer that comes out on the roadway and watching the video. It's surprising how quickly this thing just comes into view. And so, I never I've had a similar experience not with a deer but with a with a rabbit. And so, it was driving late at night or whatever.

00;32;41;08 - 00;32;56;10
Eugene
And I mean, this thing popped out and I it there was no there was just no way to react. In fact, I did absolutely nothing. I didn't swerve, I didn't move, I didn't break. I didn't you know; I couldn't do anything. So, if you have you have a scenario, you have an accident, you have a collision, you have something like that.

00;32;56;12 - 00;33;14;28
Eugene
What people are doing research, obviously, to determine a lot of these factors and a lot of these variables. How does somebody like yourself take a scenario where you've got an accident and then apply the research or the analysis properly to that specific case.

00;33;15;01 - 00;34;01;22
William
So that that can be that can be challenging. Sometimes when we do research, it's pretty sterile. But Olson talks about this in this book as a concept. And then really a lot of the social sciences of ecology equals validity. We want to make our research match the real world, but we can't. We're in a driving simulator and we've got, you know, undergraduates, students who are getting extra credit for this, not, you know, moms who are working and coming home and taking their kids to soccer practice and, you know, truck drivers who've been on the road for 6 hours and like real people working in the real economy.

00;34;01;24 - 00;34;30;14
William
So the one of the first steps is to stay away as Olson as we talk, pretty much everyone is recommended from applying the average as the bellwether standard for human performance because there's good reason to think that the average for when we're talking about tenths of a second, when we're talking about 1.1 versus 1.3 or 1.4, the average may not be the best.

00;34;30;17 - 00;35;01;07
William
The gold standard two to compare every driver to use that driver as a more complex task in the real world than in almost certainly our research subject. Then the second thing is to make sure that the research that you're working with matches the scenario as closely as possible. And this is super easy in some cases, kind of like an accident reconstruction analogy would be crush energy calculation.

00;35;01;10 - 00;35;41;02
William
The occasionally someone does hit a concrete bridge abutment head on and man, it is exactly what they did. And then that's a test. And, you know, a there's a very good, very strong correlation between A and the stiffness coefficients derived from minutes attached to your crash. But most of the time there's other factors involved. So, once we find the most applicable research, we often need to look at a lot of the other environmental factors that came up in the normal naturalistic world and see what kind of cumulative effect they have.

00;35;41;04 - 00;36;18;10
William
You know, lots of these things that we have to deal with as forensic scientists. If a researcher allowed them to slip into his or her research, they'd be considered confounding variables. And the research could kick back empirically if we're stuck dealing with them. So, we need to judge the research based on the totality of the circumstances and then maybe look for how those variables themselves, when they were tested in a in a sterile environment, change drug or performance and just make sure we don't miss the forest for the trees.

00;36;18;13 - 00;36;53;28
William
Well, I have zero down the primary aspect of this accident or traffic crash to this specific gap acceptance looming in facts, contrast sensitive contrast, low contrast recognition threshold. And that's the paper I'm looking at. And then there's all these external factors that you didn't that you didn't consider then that the balance of balancing effect of all of them may or may materially change the distribution of that for various things.

00;36;53;28 - 00;37;09;16
William
So, there's a little there can be more to it, just like crash, there can be more to it than you can just answer by looking at the five primary driving variables.

00;37;09;19 - 00;37;32;10
Eugene
Two questions I want to ask you and I'm going to forget. So, I'm going to see them both at the same time. The first one is to ask you to talk a little bit about what situational awareness means in terms of human factors. And then also you had mentioned like gap studies and some of those gaps. That is, I don't know if you can just say a few words about some of that, but maybe let's start with the situation, situational awareness.

00;37;32;13 - 00;38;06;09
William
So situational awareness is a concept that Dr. Mackenzie at Texas Tech really codified. It's an outgrowth of Christopher Watkins multiple resource theory, and she developed it specifically that I think specifically aviation is where at the time she was working. But it's human performance in a dynamic or changing environment and. She goes through three stages to perceive the environment, to comprehend the environment, and then to project the state of the environment.

00;38;06;12 - 00;38;33;19
William
And when we can do those three things, we can see it and understand what it is. We can comprehend the significance of it, and we can project how it's going to change relative to us. Then we can operate safely in that changing world, or we can operate efficiently. I mean, you can apply this to a sporting competition just like you can apply it to an industrial work process.

00;38;33;22 - 00;38;50;27
William
The pilot was originally designed to evaluate automobiles drivers, so it's sort of a three-stage process that, you know, is a is a kind of functional refinement of multiple resource theory.

00;38;51;00 - 00;39;01;08
Eugene
So, let's talk about gap like gap analysis and different types of studies that are looking at GAP analysis. What can you tell me about some of what's going on today?

00;39;01;10 - 00;39;29;23
William
That's so I think what's going on today mostly is trying to get people like me to I did with PR, trying to get people aware that it's even out there. I think through most of the Western world, there's this failure right away, kind of kind of generic understanding of failure. And right away that it involves you entering someone else's traffic flow and creating an immediate hazard.

00;39;29;25 - 00;39;51;02
William
Well, what if the hazards only immediate because I'm posting a video of a tick tock and didn't tap my brake and slow down a few miles an hour or sending an email or something like that, do you create an immediate hazard to me, or did I create an immediate hazard to myself? So those are sort of two extremes there.

00;39;51;02 - 00;40;21;04
William
But within those extremes, highway engineers going back decades have been looking at what is the time gap. This time turns out to be. The variable that they found was statistically significant relevant. What's the time gap that drivers need before the average driver, 50th percentile driver will pull out and try to cross a road or make a left turn or make a right turn or a left turn across oncoming traffic.

00;40;21;06 - 00;40;52;06
William
And that research is there. It's there for cars, it's there for trucks, but there's less for heavy vehicles where that's a less robust dataset, but it does exist and it's materially relevant. So, if we know, suppose my pull out is one that based on this research upon which in the U.S. and Canada and Western Europe, our highways are designed so the validity of it sort of speaks for itself.

00;40;52;09 - 00;41;37;09
William
Bizarre. Where are all road systems built? So, I'm more aggressive than 75% of drivers, you know, passenger vehicle drivers would be. That's worth knowing. But if your perception response time is slower than 75% of all drivers, that is also relevant information to consider. When you have any kind of insurance or legal or internal corporate determination of who caused this accident and how should we attribute blame fault liability or how do we identify problems so that we can better train and equip our car drivers?

00;41;37;11 - 00;41;52;28
William
What deficiencies in equipment are training to that? And you should know both sides and the information's out there to compare performance to performance in terms of accepting, of rejecting a gap and draft.

00;41;53;00 - 00;42;20;24
Eugene
We're looking at the research from, you know, 15, 20 years ago, you know, because we I guess we're on to about 20 years right when Jeff first had its it's getting on there but how has technology played a role in how we document evidence or document, you know, data and stuff like that. So how was it how were the experiments performed before versus what kinds of things are happening today?

00;42;20;27 - 00;42;53;04
William
What I mean, like if you go back to studies from like the 1970s, like there's a great study on this kind of better a gap acceptance from 1972. They're using like camcorder tripod mounted video and trying to get a film of these drivers to see when they turn their head. You know, we kind of went to digital video for some stuff The more recent Gap acceptance papers and in that vein particularly have been digital video.

00;42;53;07 - 00;43;18;06
William
Then, you know in the PR stuff you had the author com Estee accelerometers with a tape switch on the brake pedal muted and I did a couple of studies like that up in Ontario and not too far from you right ten years ago now we can plug in to this controller and not work out a bus in the car.

00;43;18;09 - 00;43;49;27
William
And like the stuff Virginia Tech doing is just mind blowing. And they have so many data about everything going on that the challenge for researchers is finding it. When you've got video, you've got cam bus, live feed for a gas accelerator, you know, steering wheel, steering wheel angle. Now that we've got, you know, drop by wire. So are massively robust data sets from naturalistic studies because you can plug this into a to a car that's on the road normally.

00;43;49;29 - 00;43;59;04
William
And we have the ultimate coming this close to the ultimate ecological validity is will ever get in their natural state. And as long as we analyze it correctly.

00;43;59;06 - 00;44;16;16
Eugene
Are there is there any tech that people use to, for example, track your eyes or things that track, you know, your head motion or things like that? I mean, obviously camera is helpful to kind of see where, but I'm wondering if people are actually getting like really accurate data from that sort of thing.

00;44;16;18 - 00;44;38;17
William
And your eye tracking. I'm glad you it because that's one of the coolest that one of the coolest pieces of technology that the price is coming down like if you so there's been I tracking for quite some time these big goggles that look like military night vision that you strapped to your head and you could never do anything with driver simulator them.

00;44;38;19 - 00;45;06;17
William
You would be dangerous to walk around the office wearing them and they do they did very effectively track your pupil movement at this point there's a company I think they're I think neon that's about to release or maybe just has released glasses where they just they look like the reading glasses I'm wearing and they're that will do eye tracking.

00;45;06;17 - 00;45;41;09
William
No, that's the specific ones may not reach or some of them I don't own them, and I don't know if they reach see like you know the heavy hitter government funded research institute level of the eye tracking stuff that's being used. But you know, it's getting to the point where it's almost commercially available to get good data. And the best eye tracking is prices are coming down like scanners did from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands.

00;45;41;09 - 00;45;50;00
William
And now I think this neon product is supposed to be, you know, something like €6,000 or 5060 500 bucks.

00;45;50;00 - 00;46;06;21
Eugene
US you mentioned, you know, putting these goggles on or whatever. So naturally my mind is wandering over to the virtual reality and any applications are there. Is anyone doing anything with virtual reality and looking at human perception, reaction time, stuff like that?

00;46;06;23 - 00;47;02;28
William
I think that's ultimately the direction that we're going to go because VR, at least through the display of these things, VR technology is growing of its own volition, of its own need know the applications from entertainment to defense are just enormous, that the ability to train employees of any kind using virtual reality is amazing. And it's getting like, well, I think in some cases it is really dialed in to the point where it is the accuracy and precision are spot on, that the challenge is going to be to get that and use that as the displays so that the people, whether they're clients, jurors, supervisors safety professionals, whoever it is that

00;47;02;28 - 00;47;17;04
William
needs to understand an incident, can review it in VR and have much, much closer to the same experience as the human operator in that environment.

00;47;17;06 - 00;47;34;22
Eugene
You know, and I guess the advantage and one of the difficulties and you've mentioned this in your presentation was it's very difficult to well, you can again, you know, what you see on a computer monitor is not what you're going to be seeing, you know, at an actual scene or even if you show somebody a video, then that's also not, you know, really what they're going to be able to see.

00;47;34;22 - 00;47;58;20
Eugene
But if you give the someone the ability to look around inside of a VR environment, at least they have that ability to sort of focus in on different areas, turn their head. So yeah, there's some really interesting and you can do tracking too, so you can actually drag track head position and stuff like that. I don't know if you can do eye tracking in VR, but I'm sure somebody smart enough they could think of, probably figure it out.

00;47;58;27 - 00;48;00;10
Eugene
Combine both.

00;48;00;13 - 00;48;23;24
William
I think it probably I think I don't know if it's in the I imagine you can because eye tracking is integral to eye tracking research has been integral to the creation of the better VR stuff. But yeah, I mean when you think about the fact that what's really going on, when you quote unquote see something, is that your brain's knitting together a bunch of tiny pictures and then filling in the blanks.

00;48;23;26 - 00;48;48;28
William
And that's what we call vision. I am I do. I how do I represent that? With a picture, I can represent the scene correctly. I can get the brightness correctly and I can say, here's the scene as could have been viewed by a driver. But can we do better than that? Can we give them a panoramic view of generated from the kind of 3D technology that you use, and you train and develop?

00;48;49;00 - 00;49;10;29
William
Can we give them that 3D panoramic? And then they look at it? It potentially that's a much better display. I think there's a potential to be an even truer display than the best that we can produce today.

00;49;11;01 - 00;49;41;07
Eugene
Now, has anyone talked to you or do you know of anyone that you know? Artificial intelligence is the big buzzword nowadays, And I'm just wondering about if anyone has even started talking about some areas where artificial intelligence may help. And I mean, you know, may help in research or maybe help inside of keeping drivers aware and keeping drivers attentive, you know, so that they don't get into a serious mishap of.

00;49;41;09 - 00;50;18;26
William
So that's not something I that's not something I've read about yet. But I think whether we like it or not, artificial intelligence is going to be interwoven into just about everything we do. That's an electromechanical system. So, I'd be surprised if it's I'll probably say 10 to 15 years and it'll happen in five. But if in a few years in the future, if it's if that starts not becoming integral to the human warnings and human feedback that we get from these smart vehicles.

00;50;18;29 - 00;50;46;00
Eugene
I've got a quote of the question from Stanley. I'm going to bring it up because I wanted to ask you about training and sort of what kinds of things. I mean, you do training in human factors for, you know, agencies or people that want to learn. But I'm wondering also, like what's out there. And Stanley's question here is considering geographic or financial limitations, what would you regard as the most informative and expansive resource for further education information around human factors in crash cases?

00;50;46;02 - 00;51;10;29
William
Well, I think so. So, from a continuing ed standpoint, Mutant offers a lot of his stuff online. I think it's pre-recorded webinars. I obviously think a lot of job there's I think his research is fantastic and I have a good relationship with him since I met him back in 2000. Yeah. So, I think so you know, his stuff is really good.

00;51;11;02 - 00;51;46;15
William
There are a few universities, Idaho and Aberdeen both and probably more that are teaching human factors through you, you know, distance learning format that can be that can be helpful if you want to go the formal route. And then I think that that as the demand increases forensic training group out of Nashville, the folks I teach with now, it wouldn't surprise me if Tony Becker called me and said, we’re putting together an online curriculum.

00;51;46;15 - 00;52;10;06
William
Would you, do it? You know, Rick Ruth is doing it with CD-R for Society of Automotive Engineers. I am doing it. So, I think that that will fill that market niche, especially for someone like Sealy or another con. That's a I complain about sending employees out of town for a week. It's like really you got to go to Chicago for a week.

00;52;10;06 - 00;52;21;20
William
The class I'm working at, that's a whole another level of, of expense for, you know, for folks outside, you know, outside the U.S. and other places like that.

00;52;21;23 - 00;52;26;27
Eugene
Now, do you offer training, though, like you do human factors training as well?

00;52;26;29 - 00;52;41;22
William
So forensic training group out of Nashville, Tony Becker, Scott Skinner and James Loftis, those guys about once a year I teach for them, and I'll be teaching Oklahoma State Police to short classes this June.

00;52;41;24 - 00;52;53;16
Eugene
Okay, so tell me about what you are currently working on or like what are the next steps for you in this particular area? Like research studies or ideas, you have for the future.

00;52;53;18 - 00;53;24;26
William
So I think I think the two things one of the most interesting things that is about to happen is the research that that Swaroop and Jeff were working on and Jeff at WREX getting an idea of how bright retro reflective tape is to actually alert a driver at what point that's information we have not had we've had we had those few of us even measure the brightness of the tape.

00;53;25;00 - 00;53;46;00
William
We're sort of it meets the ANSI spec for design or it doesn't meet the ANSI spec for design. But what does that mean from a human performance standpoint? Jeff Swope and Jeff Sweat are trying to get that answered. That's going to be really interesting. And, you know, as with anything, the first study that gets done is just going to be building blocks for other studies.

00;53;46;02 - 00;54;27;05
William
So that field is, I think, really important. And I think the further adaptation and refinement of things like Adrian's small object detection model, which is going to be built into the response software if that can be built upon, I think that's going to give us some good information in nighttime cases where we don't have a 1 to 1 test study group who haven't got clear sources and all of the other ambiguous were age may really be a factor way or the other.

00;54;27;08 - 00;55;03;04
William
So that's so small Object detection model is a visibility model that was developed in the early nineties as the first version of it that comes out by a German researcher, Wilhelm Adrian. And it's a pretty it's a pretty mathematically intense really. It's a lighting model and there are some issues that make it difficult, 1 to 1 comparison with a crash reconstruction, the simplicity and size of the object.

00;55;03;10 - 00;55;35;06
William
I mean, it's this small object detection model that it wasn't the size of a tractor trailer or an intel pedestrian standing up. So there are certainly areas where it's not an apples to apples comparison, but there's a tremendous amount of really good information in there about how the brightness of glare and the number of glare sources, the angle of the sources, the age of the viewer all change our ability to see an object under low light conditions.

00;55;35;08 - 00;55;46;24
William
Yeah. So, I think there's a lot of great stuff in it, but it needs for crash reconstruction. It needs some further fleshing out and it can be it can be improved.

00;55;46;27 - 00;55;56;10
Eugene
Yeah. For sure it will work. We're just getting on a little bit, but could I share your LinkedIn profile just in case people wanted to get a hold of you or something like that?

00;55;56;13 - 00;55;57;24
William
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

00;55;57;25 - 00;56;11;16
Eugene
Only bring it up here. So that's let me see if I meet this larger go, I'll be bigger. So yeah, if anyone's interested you can find we'll up on LinkedIn and also on his website here. So, it’s the best place to get a hold of you just through the website.

00;56;11;19 - 00;56;35;14
William
Yeah, I will. I have to confess to being probably the worst LinkedIn user in the world. Every time I walk in, I find messages that I need to apologize for not responding to. But email I am. I'm pretty good. I'm out of that responding to. So yeah, if I can if I can help out, that's the best way to get in touch with me.

00;56;35;17 - 00;56;46;20
Eugene
Well, I enjoyed your presentation, you know, at WREX. And are you going to be at any other conferences in your future? Just curious if anyone wants to try and catch you at some other conference when you got lined up next?

00;56;46;22 - 00;57;12;26
William
So next one is the Texas Association of Accident Reconstruction Specialists in October, and I believe it is in San Antonio this year. I know it's not in Austin because of the conflict with the Formula One race. They thought I got tired of fighting for space. So, I believe San Antonio. But it's me on the T, a R and Stars website.

00;57;12;26 - 00;57;45;03
William
That would be the next one. And that's, I think, a full three day on and that is the Taj membership is really an advanced group of very well-trained people in general. I mean they've had Doc from Utah, they've had Jeff Sue so I'm going to try to guess the Taj one would be a little bit more on the advanced side where the human factors proper class that I teach, like what I'll be doing for Oklahoma State Police.

00;57;45;05 - 00;58;20;18
William
As a former police officer, I know you don't come in with tons and tons of a background all the time. I'm trying to start from the ground up. And with that one, ideally either ready to get into new advanced class and really like really to dive in from the SA understanding things and not people along the way. So that's, that's an introduction to get you through your work as a police officer and a good foundation to go on this one for guitars, I'm really going to try to give those folks the best I've got so it'll be a little more advanced.

00;58;20;21 - 00;58;25;09
Eugene
Okay. Jeffrey Martin here is asking if you're going to be at peace in October.

00;58;25;11 - 00;58;53;00
William
I would love to be working. Work and family may get in the way of that, especially with TARS. That's the heart of my son's crazy competitive travel all across the country, soccer season. And then he can drive himself there now. But I kind of hate to ditch him. But if I can, yeah, each of these is one I would really, really like to be.

00;58;53;03 - 00;58;57;01
William
That's as he finishes high school. That's one of the other for you.

00;58;57;03 - 00;59;09;09
Eugene
Well look, thank you so much for being here today. A ton of information. Great presentation. I really like the content and the way you sort of delivered it. It was really, really great to follow along and what you had going so, yeah. Thank you so much for being here.

00;59;09;11 - 00;59;15;09
William
June. Thank you very much for having me on. It's been a lot of fun and I can't wait to talk to you more about the 3D stuff.

00;59;15;12 - 00;59;21;18
Eugene
Awesome. Thanks everyone for being here. I really appreciate your time and I wish you all a very happy Thursday. Take care. Bye.