A new era in driving simulation

By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 1992-09-09

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An estimated 10 million drivers around the world have learned to drive with the assistance of simulators, according to Kathy McCain, manager of public relations for Doron Precision Instruments of Binghampton, New York. Doron is well known in North American driver education circles and is the largest manufacturer of simulator systems for driver training. It sells driving simulators in over 50 countries.

Doron's simulators range from its L301 stock-in-trade model, that has students use a steering wheel and pedal controls to indicate their reactions to driving scenes shown with a 16mm film projector, to a fully interactive L300 VMT vehicle maneuvering trainer that offers a very realistic driving experience to trainee truck drivers.

The range includes a partially interactive simulator, which allows drivers to progress through a program presented on video, a touch-screen video-based analyzer that tests knowledge and cognitive progress, and the SR2. The SR2 is based on aircraft simulator technology and is a sort of mini-theatre with movement. Holding up to 20 passengers, it provides a physical sensation to accompany video movies on topics such as go-cart rides, rollercoasters and travel scenes. It can usually be found at shopping malls, trade conferences and amusement parks.

Simulators like Doron's L301 have been around for quite a while. They've been used to train drivers since the early '50s. They get mixed reviews in the driver training world. Richard Dickson gave up using them in his Vancouver, B.C., driving school back in 1984. Now, as Young Drivers of Canada regional representative for B.C., he doesn't see any great value for simulators in the immediate future. High school teacher Will Parnell finds them extremely valuable in his Baldwin County, Alabama programs. Darrell Cyr bought some secondhand machines for his commercial driving school in Wichita, Kansas, and he loves them.

Safety researchers' views on their effectiveness are mixed also. GM's chief traffic safety researcher, Leonard Evans, doesn't see much value in them as tools for instructing beginners.

"An accompanied learner driver can practise starting and stopping a real car five times per minute; a simulator offers little difference in training rate or safety," he wrote in his recent book Traffic Safety and the Driver. In contrast to aircraft simulators, he sees them as having little value in terms of safety. "While the performance skills learned in simulators can be critical in emergencies in the air," Evans says, "car driving emergency situations usually arise because of expectancy violations.

Safety researcher Dr. James McKnight has been dealing with simulators since the '60s. He too feels they have little value for teaching early psychomotor skills. "The purpose of simulation," he says, "is not to teach people how to drive. They're a way of bringing the driving scene into the classroom-to provide the means by which the driving student can tell you what he saw the same as commentary driving."

This view is echoed by Doron's Deborah Quackenbush. She sees the simulator as a medium for the instructor to help the student explore the complex relationship between the driver and the driving environment. This is where the strength of Doron's system lies, she says. "We provide the total system, the hardware and the software. We develop the curriculum that goes with the simulator."

Quackenbush admits that some people see projectors and 16mm film as being out of date. But the simulator is merely a tool, she argues. The student watching a film on evasive maneuvers, for example, will be called on to react physically to a driving situation.

When a car or pedestrian suddenly appears in the driving path, how does the student respond with the steering wheel, gas pedal or brake? The computer will record these inputs but that's where the simulator leaves off and teaching begins. Were the inputs the correct or best ones for the situation? Should the driver have steered right or left to avoid? What were the potential consequences of these reactions if the situation were real?

The tool is only as good as the teacher who uses it, Quackenbush points out. Used effectively, she says, it provides a highly interactive teaching environment which is much more effective than a teacher lecturing or merely showing videos.

"Research shows that we remember only about 10% of what we hear. If I show you, it'll be about 30%, but if you do it then it's about 90%."

Atari

New on the driving simulator scene is Atari Games Corporation, of Milpitas, California. Recently Atari has developed its amusement arcade game, Hard Drivin, "the world's first realistic driving simulator," into a practical training device. It's currently developing a version aimed at the police training market.

In contrast to Doron's simulators, Atari's driving environments are generated by computer graphics and the simulators are fully interactive. They're programmed with the responses of real cars-the police version offers the Ford Crown Victoria-and the steering, braking and accelerator pedals produce similar kinds of responses. The steering wheel will unwind by itself as the driver accelerates out of a turn. The driver who goes into a turn too fast will likely lose control, and will lose control more easily by braking while in the turn.

The trouble with generating driving environments by computer graphics, says McKnight, is that the complexity of the environment isn't there. Training drivers to be safer, McKnight feels, means training them to pick hazard cues out of a complex environment of cars, pedestrians, signs, and other traffic events. "We're about 5 to 10 years away from that kind of complexity in programming," he says.

He has an Atari simulator at his National Public Services Research Institute headquarters at Landover, Maryland, which he's using for research into cues for alcohol impairment. "One of the problems with this kind of research," McKnight says, "is that when you try to measure alcohol impairment on a task, you have the problem that as people become more impaired they are also learning the task." Since driving is an already familiar task for most subjects the learning curve problem isn't there.

It's the capability of the Doron-type of simulator to present complex and realistic traffic environments for student interaction that McKnight sees as its most valuable asset, but he doesn't think it effectively replaces time spent in the car working on the basics of driving. Studies showing that it does were carried out a long time ago, he says. But "they were terrible studies. One of the first things I did in traffic safety was a study of simulators and their role in driver improvement. None of us were very sophisticated in those days but I'm not going to say that they don't substitute for the car in that you could accomplish as much (in terms of dealing with traffic scenarios) in 30 minutes as you could in two hours on the street."

Meanwhile Atari is forging ahead with its police training simulator. A three-screen version offering some side vision has been displayed at traffic safety conferences across the U.S. and Canada recently. It's also been demonstrated in Sweden and will be going to Germany shortly, says Atari simulation project director Jim Flack. A five-screen version offering a 205-degree visual field has also been displayed. This will be used on the police training version and will allow trainees to check both ways at intersections while carrying out driving exercises.

Atari isn't ready for the general driver education market yet, says Flack, but his group is busy gathering feedback on this market and what its simulator needs will be.

The task of identifying the market niche was a lot easier for police needs than it will be for general driver training, Flack is finding. The police had standards and training objectives pretty well in hand. In driver training this isn't the case. He doesn't see any movement amongst driver educators towards the kinds of standards Atari would need to begin developing its software.

He recognizes, too, the difficulty the driver education community seems to have envisioning a use for his machine. "It's understandable to me that organizations focused on basic training would have difficulty seeing its application, because what they're seeing is something that's performance-oriented and that's not their role in training. It's hard for them to envision its application," he said.

This may be the greatest block to the development of an Atari simulator that'll be effective and valuable for driver training use in the near future. Both Atari and the driver training community have major hurdles to leap. "Frankly," Flack says," for us to provide the fundamentals requires us to do more development in software. So it's more work for us and it's a greater leap of the imagination for them.

"The basic technology of both the hardware platform and the software technique is fairly well in hand for us. The difficulty is, if you can create a variety of road conditions, traffic conditions, and you can collect and analyze quite a variety of data...steering wheel angle, brake pedal pressure, forward velocity and lateral acceleration, lane position...if you can measure all of these things, then the challenge for technologists is what are the training objectives? That's the key. It's curriculum."

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