A Collaborative Virtual Environment for Safe Driving in a Virtual City by Obeying Traffic Laws

Abstract

The collaborative virtual city environment provides practice to perform informal unstructured, collaborative, constructivist learning instead of instructing individuals on a formal, structured, and programmed based environment. A collaborative virtual city environment has been created using vizard software that can be used by new drivers to help them learn about traffic laws and traffic safety in a safe controlled environment. Pilot studies have been conducted with the system showing its partial success and demonstrate that collaborative learning approach we propose can succeed with smaller group sizes. A significant number of participants followed the traffic rules. Overall 24% participants did not follow any traffic rule. Interestingly the majority of users who did not follow the traffic rules were novice users. Also, there was no marked difference noted for following the traffic rules between participants using the non-immersive and immersive environment. Subjective responses indicated that the Collaborative virtual environment was realistic and engaging. This environment will allow users to prepare for driving exams and we hope that it could possibly become an alternative, supplement, or replacement for the traditional driver's handbook. Index Terms-Collaborative virtual environment, virtual worlds training simulations, driving simulator, transportation visualization, driver behavior, driver training  This paper proposes an immersive multiuser environment for teaching traffic safety and driving skills in a virtual city. We hope that users of the application will be able to gain skills and knowledge in the virtual environment that they can apply to the real world due to the sense of presence and realism a virtual environment provides. Our contribution lies in our approach to combine computer simulated agents and user controlled autonomous agents in a collaborative virtual environment to teach traffic safety and driving skills in a virtual city. A collaborative 3D virtual city environment has been created that can be used by new drivers to help them learn about traffic laws and traffic safety in a safe controlled 84