A training oriented driving simulator

Abstract

In today's China, a growing number of people have the opportunity to have their own cars. This creates tremendous requirement of training of new drivers. At the same time, recent advances in Computer Graphics and Virtual Reality system have brought the new opportunities for the development of driving simulation. This paper describes a driving simulator named TODS which is the acronym of training oriented driving simulator, developed for rigorous driving training and for Computer Graphics study. TODS is designed under the human-in-the-loop real-time simulation mode providing 120°horizontal FOV(Field of View) and realistic visual feedback to give the driver a realistic feeling of immersion similar to the feeling in a real moving vehicle. TODS utilizes state-of-the-art real-time rendering techniques in Vertex Shader and Pixel Shader [1] to make it more flexible to implement more real-time rendering algorithms in GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) so as to enhance the system function. TODS's scene model is designed and constructed according to the "Driving Test Specification" of China to meet the demands of rigorous driving training. And a kind of modular construction method is used in the work of scene authoring in TODS. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2007.