Driving simulator & Introduction oszkar on 30 Jul 2008 10:18 am
My God, It’s Full of Small Simulators
The title of this post was the first sentence that popped into my mind, when I figured out that our DriveSafety simulators can be divided into many small, so called SingleBox, simulators. The title is of course an hommage to Clarke and Kubrick’s timeless work 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this movie Dave Bowman realizes, that the monolith is full of stars.
My realization that the simulator is full of small, SingleBox simulators reminded me of the above scene from the movie. The SingleBoxes can be set up by accessing the configuration page of any DriveSafety simulator. Each channel computer can be reconfigured to act as a separate system. In this case the computers have more work to do, since they all have to act both as hosts and channels in the same time. This could lead to some dropped frames, but in our experience, the simulations are totally acceptable. Here is an interesting image showing multiple scenarios running on what used to be channels and are SingleBoxes here:
What’s the use of this? The most important property of the SingleBoxes is that they are highly portable, which is very important for presentation purposes. We just had one of them shipped for a demonstration of my paper at the Intelligent Environments conference past week in Seattle. We just separated the rear channel off the DS-100, which was otherwise left fully operational. The other advantage of the SingleBox mode is the possibility to combine many of these into a single simulation. This would open a new range of study topics, where more than one subject would participate in the same scenario, therefore allowing interaction between the drivers. Some students already expressed their willingness to volunteer in such experiments. I hope they are not fueled by the possibility to play bumper cars in a virtual world.
Before finishing, let me get back to the topic of the Space Odyssey movie for a few more seconds. If you watched it, have you ever wondered about the meaning of the starchild? I always did. Kubrick said about it that it is up for anyone to come up with their own explanation. But I really like this one by Donald MacGregor. Accordingly, it is not by chance that Richard Strauss‘ Also Sprach Zarathustra was selected for the opening theme of the movie. This piece was composed based on Friedrich Nietzsche’s same-titled book, which apparently served as inspiration to Kubrick’s fascinating movies. If I got you interested, please visit the link with the detailed explanation.
Oszkar Palinko
