rec.autos.simulators

3d-fahrschule does all this, and makes sure you check blindspots at
junctions, watch out for pedestrians, follow speed limits etc.

   During the CART race in Surfer's Paradise last year,  American Jimmy Vasser
 got to do a demo lap of the Aussie circuit in a V8 Super Car.  
Shifting was the most difficult thing for him to learn.  Using the left hand to
shift is very unnatural for folks who have grown up with Left Hand Drive.
      He missed several downshifts and appologised after the lap to the engineer(S)
 who would have to tear down and rebuild the ***.
dave henrie

Depends on the person.  I have had no problems jumping into a British car
and driving, even when the pace steps up considerably, despite nearly 20
years of "muscle memory" from left hand drive.

Stephen

I don't remember the link, but there was a story this week about an Airline
Pilot who went into Staples asking about a Flight Training Simulator for her
daughter, who was also interested in flying.

The Staples Employee reported the questions to the FBI, and the FBI went
knocking on the poor persons door and interrogated them.

We have completely lost our friggen minds.

-Larry

Roman shortswords were carried on the right, and drawn with the right hand.  
It made it easier for them to maintain tight formations in battlefield
conditions.

Whether that has any relevance to what side of the road people drive on, I
haven't a clue.

cheers
John

Well, for one, VC does not have multiplayer I don't believe.  And for two,
you do need to "drive like a fool to participate."  The game is completely
nuts; I fooled with it for a while but found it not to my liking.  It's a
game of mass slaughter, and has nothing in it that anyone would consider
ethical.  :)

Alanb

It has everything to do with those. That, in fact, is the whole point.
Controlling a car is not *that* difficult, but it takes a lot of attention
to what you're doing until it becomes "automatic". Likewise, keeping track
of where you're going and the correct response to specific traffic
situations (buses pulling out of stops, school crossings, roundabouts
etc...) isn't all that difficult. Put all three together and the student's
attention/ability to cope is stretched more than just a little.

IMO, simulation can help all three factors. Especially where response to
certain "set pieces" in traffic is concerned. There's a big gap between
knowing what to do and acting correctly when the time comes. Sims can surely
help to bridge that gap.

It only needs to be self contained. Both the sim and the real world driving
experience are "real" in their own context.

Theorethically, this should be an area where sim experience is valuable, as
we're talking "sense of position" here. Unless it's a very tight squeeze,
one never really visually checks whether one will clear an obstacle or not.
Instead it's inferred from what one can see and one's mental model of the
car, the surroundings and the projection of the current trajectory. It all
happens in the head, so there should be little difference between real world
and sim world from a driver's seat perspective.

I certainly don't experience that aspect as different, but I learned to
drive first and sim later, so it might be interesting to hear from the other
side of the coin (is RallyBrat monitoring this thread?).

I don't claim to be an expert, but I will confess to knowing more than your
average bear (or at least I think I do). I have a lot of experience with
sims and I have read quite some biomedical, neurological and psychological
material on what immersion is and why we simulation/game reality as "real".

To cut a long (and dull) story short, it really only takes a fairly crude
simulator to make an experience believable. The reason the high tech
simulators exist is people need to practise life threathening emergencies in
them. That's why they have complete, detailed full size mock-ups of
cabs/cockpits (when the ground is coming up at 200ft/s, is not a good time
to have to look for the switch that engages the back-up ILS) and motion
simulators. The ADAC truck simulator exists to familiarize drivers with the
effects of temperature on certain chemicals in tank transports which affect
the handling of the whole combination. Though one can take a truck/trailer
(with helper wheels) to a skidpad, to really "simulate" what happens would
be very difficult without the risk of a chemical spill/fire, so in the end
they decided to build a simulator. Seeing as these effects are a "feel"
thing, it had to be very sofisticated in the motion simulator department
(and, from second hand experience, I can attest it's "scarily realistic").

However, the beginner driver will not be doing any "seat of the pants"
driving and most emergencies will require either braking or swerving(*), so
a wheel/pedal set is really all that's required. Your learner car shouldn't
feature as many switches and knobs as a 747. Especially over here, where the
law requires you to know what each one does.

(*)Rem: and realising you've completely overlooked the car coming the other
way because you were still looking at the kid on the bicycle and not for/at
your escape route. Better to do that in a sim than in real life, I'd say.

It's the truth, though. Not that I really raced in traffic the way it's done
in the sim, but I did habitually speed by quite a margin (this was before
speedcameras started popping up all over the place) and I did rely too much
on other drivers not to do anything unexpected. The traffic AI in NFS,
however, is of the moron kind and I realised that if I didn't stand a chance
of avoiding an accident in this oversimplified game, I wouldn't stand a
chance in hell in the real world. That slowed me down quite a bit, getting
older and more responsible did the rest.

Jan.
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