Using a geographic information system for the generation of driving simulator scenes

Driving simulators often require a linear description of scenes in terms of events which happen at specified locations. This concept is very sensible for the actual simulation, since it not only saves space, but also makes simulations repeatable. Since maneuverability is essentially constrained to one dimension, test persons will encounter the very same scenes and challenges during the simulation. However, defining scenes with a reasonable complexity or even scenes resembling real world situations is very elaborate. Furthermore, scene reuse is not supported very well, since cutting and pasting of linear scene descriptions requires a considerable ability to imagine the actual scenes being manipulated. In this paper, we show how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be used to define, visualize, and manage scene descriptions for a simulator system. To that end, we have chosen ArcGIS from ESRI, Inc. for the GIS part and STISIM drive from Systems Technology, Inc. for the simulator part. One key characteristic of the approach is that rather than putting the entire effort into building individual simulator scenes, one builds simulator worlds, from which later different simulator scenes can be derived with little effort.