Driving assessment and training method and apparatus

A process for mitigation of simulator sickness in drivers or pilots operating simulators, comprising the steps:

• A) starting a scenario in a Driver Guidance System Simulation Terminal Application;
• B) determining at the beginning of said scenario from data supplied by said Driver Guidance System Simulation Terminal Application an initial position and orientation in a virtual world for each of one or more displays of a simulator as viewed from a vehicle or plane being controlled by a driver or pilot operating a simulator, wherein said scenario could be either a drive through any path in said virtual world or a flight through any airspace in said virtual world and wherein events happen during said drive or flight to which a driver or pilot operating said simulator must react;
• C) generating the virtual image of the roads or airspace which said driver or pilot can see from said initial position for each of said one or more displays;
• D) receiving and processing at a Vehicle Dynamics Model inputs from said driver or pilot who manipulates controls to operate said simulator to control said vehicle or plane;
• E) calculating in said Vehicle Dynamics Model how the inputs from said driver or pilot would affect the position, velocity and orientation of said vehicle or plane and how the viewpoints displayed on each of said one or more displays is changed;
• F) communicating the resulting position and orientation of said viewpoints for each of said one or more displays and their details to a rendering process which functions to render world objects to a frame buffer;
• G) said rendering process retrieves 3D object definitions and 3D world definitions as well as location and orientation information for fixed objects and motion objects from a database based upon the current position and orientation of each of said one or more viewpoints in said virtual world;
• H) using said information received from said database and the location and orientation of each of said one or more viewpoints to render virtual images of all the objects that may potentially be screened or obscured by a sickness mitigation object for each of said one or more displays to a frame buffer;
• I) receiving dynamic definition data for a sickness mitigation object which defines its desired display characteristics;
• J) translating, rotating and scaling said sickness mitigation object and rendering said sickness mitigation object to said frame buffer;
• K) rendering objects that will not be screened or obscured by a sickness mitigation object to said frame buffer;
• L) determining vehicle speed, and increasing transparency of said sickness mitigation object when the vehicle said driver or pilot is controlling is stopped or closed to stopped, and decreasing the transparency of said sickness mitigation object as said vehicle said driver or pilot is controlling accelerates from a stop;
• and
• M) displaying said frame buffer.

A process for mitigation of simulator sickness in drivers or pilots operating drones, comprising the steps:

• A) receiving panoramic video stream image data of the roads or airspace which said drone can see from the drone's position in the real world for each of said one or more displays;
• B) receiving dynamic definition data for a sickness mitigation object which defines its desired display characteristics;
• C) translating, rotating and scaling said sickness mitigation object and rendering said sickness mitigation object to a frame buffer using an alpha mixing process to mix the color of pixels from said real world image that overlap with a pixel from said sickness mitigation object so as to reduce motion saturation of the displayed image;
• D) rendering pixel data that will not be screened or obscured by a sickness mitigation object from the video stream image data arriving from said drone to said frame buffer;
• E) determining vehicle speed, and increasing transparency of said sickness mitigation object when the vehicle said driver or pilot is controlling is stopped or closed to stopped, and decreasing the transparency of said sickness mitigation object as said vehicle said driver or pilot is controlling accelerates from a stop;
• and
• F) displaying said frame buffer.