Abstract:

A novice driver does not have enough driving experience. Japanese general novice can get driver's license 18 years of age and older. Therefore, they don't have enough driving experience. An experience that includes worse cases such as traffic accidents is important for understanding how to drive safely. A novice driver learns more skills directly; a traffic accident experiences gives the knowledge how to avoid traffic accident. However, the novice driver does not want to get knowledge how to avoid traffic accident by real traffic accident experiences.

We can find a system such as driving simulator for getting more driving experiences. The driving simulator generates to acquire traffic accident situation in the virtual environment. The accident event provides driver's view on the screen. The learner can get experience for risk avoiding behavior subjectively by the driver's view. However, it is difficult to grasp deeply what is the cause of traffic accident. When the driver encounters traffic accident situation suddenly, the driver panics by sudden accidental situation. To keep acquiring the driving training with driver’s view and accidental event, the learners must keep stressful condition in the driving simulator. In this result, the driver can get understand subjectively what is the cause of traffic accident.

On the other hand, a witness can understand traffic accident situation deeply. The witness of traffic accident can grasp what is the cause of the accident situation objectively. Because, a witness view has wider eyesight than driver's view. As a result, the witness view can correct more detail of traffic accident situation than driver’s view. And it can be corrected with a calm mind. In this research, we have built a traffic accident simulation system for traffic safety education. The proposed system provides a traffic accident simulation by view of witness. Especially, this prototype system provides dual view of witness. The main view is a normal witness view on the ground. The learner become usual witness. The second view is a bird's-eye view. This view provides to get understanding the traffic accident situation by viewed from directly above.

This system uses a smartphone and VR goggle. And, this system provides a traffic accident replaying over the mixed reality environment. The ground view is provided by integrated smartphone camera and overlaid 3DCG character such as car and human. This view provides the background canvas of the realtime captured by integrated smartphone camera, and the traffic scene generated by 3DCG animation overlays the traffic accident situation on the real space. The bird's-eye view is provided by captured picture by the multicopter such as drone. This view provides the traffic accident situation mapped 3DCG character vertically on the captured picture. This proposed system is not based only 3DCG environment. As a result, the learners can follow objectively traffic accident situation, by ground view, and the learners can understand what the cause of the traffic accident. And, the learners can follow deeply traffic accident situation by proposed dual view.

In this paper, we describe the environment of mixed reality based traffic accident simulation system. And we describe a configuration of proposed prototype system. Finally, we show the experimental use and result.

Keywords:

Traffic safety education, mixed reality, virtual experience, traffic accident simulation.