The Ultimate Driving Simulator of Volvo: How its Uses Gaming Technology to Enhance Safety
The Swedish luxury automobile brand Volvo cars have used the latest gaming technology to develop the new feature known as” the ultimate driving simulator.” However, the company is not going to use the newly developed technology in gaming. Instead, it will improve the technology of autonomous driving and enhance safety while driving in real conditions. The company has used a simulator based on mixed reality.
The luxury automobile brand has been working with technologies to improve autonomous driving for more than a decade. Its main aim is to develop such safety features that can improve autonomous driving when driving. In the active driving assistance systems rankings published in the year 2020 in Consumer Reports in which General Motors ranked the highest position, the Sweden-based luxury automobile manufacturer, however, positioned moderately. The company is hopeful that its newly introduced simulator will help it establish solid ground among the top leaders.
Regarding the simulator features, it has a moving seat for drivers, a steering wheel integrated with Haptic feedback, and a headset based on virtual reality allowing to overlay the elements of augmented reality onto the road. Also, it includes the advanced full body Haptic suit, Teslasuit, which can efficiently monitor the body’s reactions. According to Volvo, the company engineers’ sophisticated technology will help test all sorts of driving scenes when driving in real environments; however, the tests will be done on the test track road.
Volvo’s Driving Simulator: How can it be used?
Among the various things that the company will test includes assisting drivers, active safety, user interfaces based on autonomous driving, and models of cars to be introduced shortly. Meanwhile, Volvo may lower the bar for what they want to test, forgo the hardware’s development for testing, shorten the testing process, and reduce the cost to be incurred on the development of the features. The newly introduced simulator will provide more details and data, which will ultimately help the company to develop new features based on autonomous driving and safety while autonomous while driving. Most significantly, it will provide significant insights into the car’s specific parts and the interaction of the vehicle and the driver while driving in real conditions.
The most important thing will be to understand various drivers’ reactions in many real driving scenarios when autonomous driving based features inform them. In simple terms, the independent drivers’ ability to drill down efficiently will help Volvo improve safety features accordingly.
As per the senior leader of User Experience at the Open Innovation Arena of Volvo, Casper Wickman, the latest introduced technology will help the company to study the authentic reactions of human beings when they are driving in real conditions and that too at a fraction of the cost that will occur on a real test. He further mentioned that working with great companies like Teslasuit, Varjo, and Unity has made them able to test so many different scenarios with an entirely real look and feel without physically building anything. Overall, while developing systems for car safety such as collision-avoiding features when driving on the road, it becomes crucial to test the components.
But testing these features in real-life scenarios can be expensive, time-consuming, and dangerous. However, in such circumstances, mixed and virtual reality simulations provide for entirely safe testing in real conditions without the need to build any physical or complicated setup. Casper Wickman concluded that Volvo is leading and exploring to develop more safe cars while using this advanced technology.
