Collaborative Driving Simulation

This paper describes the development of a dual-location driving simulator by researchers at the Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC) at Iowa State University. The simulator connects drivers in two highly immersive virtual reality interfaces, the C4 and the C6, both located at VRAC. The vehicle dynamics is computed separately for each vehicle by independent Windows NT systems running VDANL. These systems also perform real-time data acquisition from the vehicle bucks and terrain queries at each dynamics time-step. The vehicles exchange dynamics information including vehicle position and orientation, and their derivatives. VRAC researchers will use the driving simulator for experiments involving collaborative or competitive maneuvering. Applications include the maneuvering of farm vehicles, battlefield simulation and racing.