Immersive driving simulation for driver education and analysis

Virtual environments are abundant in society today, and are mostly presented to persons via games. These games are becoming highly immersive, and the technology driving their development can transcend entertainment and can also be used for training purposes. This can be said of driving games; graphics and real time physics modeling have been refined to such a point by these games that driving simulators can be used to model real world driving experiences at low cost. Driving simulators in existence range from expensive installations at research institutes to commercially available software for personal computers. There are also driving simulators on the web, but these are usually two dimensional and have no serious training or data analysis component. This paper outlines the design of a three dimensional driving simulator currently in development. This simulator attempts to bring a serious training tool to the web browser and mobile platforms while making an effort to gather demographic and performance data. The goal of this simulator is to create a virtual learning environment used for driver education that is deployed not only as an installation on a personal computer, but also via web pages and mobile phones. Early testing has given positive results on the realism and immersion of the virtual environment with users reporting favourable learning experiences.