Towards an immersive visualization of consumer-level simulations of vehicular traffic

Since the beginning of the 2010 decade, many improvements have been made in terms of Virtual Reality (VR) hardware technologies and software platforms. Such trend is expected to continue, pushing the penetration rate of VR headsets. In the meantime, two research questions emerge: (a) how 3D-based immersive environments may get to be used, and with which benefits, in place of 2D ones, and, (b) how to support such integration. We focus on the latter, taking as a case study SUMO, a well-known PC-based vehicular traffic simulation tool. To this aim, we adopt an approach based on the OpenGL intercept technique, with the implementation of the OGL2VR middleware, which has been extended to remove graphical artifacts and to include the on/off toggling of dynamic elements in a 3D scene. We here describe the solutions that have been embraced, as well as the challenges that still remain along this path, to render dynamic traffic animations in an immersive setting to support the use of a blended 2D/3D environment.