The drunken. The drugged. The drowsy. Ginger Watson puts them behind the wheel of her Chevy Malibu every day and then sets them loose in traffic, just hoping that they'll get into a really messy crack-up. "You have to see people falling asleep behind the wheel of a car," Watson says gleefully.
Seated at the wheel of the most advanced driving simulator in the world, this woman can't see the 15 projectors overhead that create a virtual world so real she will forget her car is on the road to nowhere.
Fortunately for those drivers, the danger is purely virtual. That Malibu isn't exactly a real car. It's a Chevy, all right, with real seats and real controls, but instead of wheels it sports hydraulic actuators that do a convincing imitation of the rumble of tires on a road. Flip up the hood, and instead of an engine there's a tangle of cables and computers. Step outside the vehicle, and the landscape fades away if viewed from the wrong angle. This demolition derby car that easily goes from 0 to 60 does it in a huge simulator. Here, Watson, director of the Human Factors Laboratory at the National Advanced Driving Simulator, can test any driver in the most awful scenario imaginable and do it over and over again.
