Virtual Reality Research Demonstration at the Washington D.C. Auto Show

In January 2018, the resarch group was invited by the National Science Foundation to present a demonstration of our research at the Washington D.C. Auto Show. The demo consisted of a virtual reality headset reliving the ‘‘ring road experiments’’ that showed how an autonomous vehicle operating in mixed human/autonomous traffic can dampen traffic waves and lead to smoother and lower-emissions traffic.

#NSFfunded researchers @VUEngineering @vanderbiltU demo VR technology showing the impact of autonomous vehicles on traffic flow at @MobilityTalks #WAS18 pic.twitter.com/e0DH08Q9xe

— National Science Fdn (@NSF) January 24, 2018

The hardware required to run high-end virtual reality is quite powerful, which posed an issue when transporting everything needed for the demo. My personal desktop computer, equipped with a NVidia GTX 1070, had to be taken on the plane. When running the VR demo for 10 hours, I had to consider thermals of the computer and whether a more compact hardware setup, such as a laptop, could have lasted all day. Additionally, the conference center has notably slow wireless internet, so we had to figure out a way to run the VR video locally¹ and ended up using DeoVR. The player was fairly good (most notably lacking a repeat function) but video codec support required some experimentation to achieve stable playback.

Here is a video similar to what was presented (credit: Fangyu Wu):

Another video showing a more comprehensive visualization: