The Future Of Driving Simulation

The Past to Present. The simulation of the driving experience has been used for both research and most especially for driver training. In large part, the state of the art in driving simulation has been contingent upon wider developments in simulation science. The challenge of ground-vehicle simulation provides stiffer challenges than simulation of airborne vehicles. Current advances have seen high-fidelity, multi-million-dollar facilities. The advantage is that they provide capacities now coming very close to the Turing test for simulated reality. The disadvantage is that they are so expensive as to be almost unique and so no replicable science is conducted on them. The Present to the Near Future. Simulation not only improves with the technical capacities of the age, it also diversifies. Thus, in modern simulations there are options associated with game-playing, full virtual environments, and augmented forms of reality as well as improvements on the traditional fixed and motion-based facilities. We anticipate that such branches of development will further diversify as new and innovative methods of rendering surrogate surroundings continue to proliferate. Worlds to Come. The fundamental function of simulation is to augment current reality with programmable objects or entities or to replace the whole environments with a surrogate experience. However, our whole world of experience is represented in the brain. Thus, all external technologies only serve to generate a pattern of brain stimulation. Our further future is thus headed toward direct brain stimulation. External facilities of the sort we see today at the most advanced facilities will be replaced by direct brain stimulation portable packages. Dangerously, one will be able to chose one’s own reality and may therefore become confused about just what reality is. At such a juncture simulation and reality may no longer be distinguishable. Thus, the end point of all forms of simulation will be a philosophical paradox