The SimWorld project has the goal of incorporating, rapidly and in detail, the traffic, roads and landscapes of actual test tracks in vehicle simulators, based on geodata and vehicle measurements. In this interdisciplinary project, the DFD Science Communication and Visualization department is responsible for setting up the underlying geodatabase and deriving the landscape models from remote sensing and GIS data.
Real-life testing of future driver assistance systems can sometimes be dangerous. Therefore, such systems are first developed and tested using a professional-quality driver simulator. Such a simulator is available at the DLR Institute of Transportation Systems in Braunschweig. So far, it only contains manually derived and highly generalized landscape representations which are not based on terrain models. Thanks to interdisciplinary cooperation with the geodata specialists at DFD, future simulations will draw on a geodatabase. This makes the design of test scenarios more flexible, rapid and realistic, and, in addition, independent of the visualization engine used.