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In recent years driving simulators have emerged as powerful tools to support highway safety evaluations. This trend, combined with advances in CAD technology, theoretically allows the creation of driving simulator scenarios that can be used to conduct virtual road safety audits in order to better understand driver performance on the field while still benefiting from a controlled laboratory environment. Regardless of advances in technology, the scenario creation process is a lengthy and system-specific process. Time spent creating a scenario for a specific simulator provides no benefit to researchers or transportation designers who wish to run an experiment using the same scenario on a different platform.

This lack of scenario compatibility is a barrier to collaboration between institutions conducting driving simulation research. Having scenarios that can be shared across multiple platforms can foster collaboration between institutions, and provide opportunities to study broader subject demographics and regional characteristics. This project aims to create the core of a driving simulator scenario (visual database and road surface definition) that is compatible with two popular simulator platforms: MiniSim and RTI. The focus of the team on the core aspect of the scenario is because the 3d modelling task and road definition are among the most time consuming tasks in scenario creation.

The creation of a cross-platform driving simulator scenario will be demonstrated by creating the 3d model and road surface definition of the roads around an existing intersection, preferably one for which naturalistic driving data is available. A computer program will be developed to create the necessary cross sectional data needed to define a road surface on both systems. The entire procedure will be documented in a final report that target simulator users that want to collaborate on research with other institutions across different driving simulator platforms.