A professor at the University of Minnesota is looking at doing a project to
evaluate several different combinations of train crossing signs. This will
be a "psychology" style experiment where you set up maybe a dozen different
scenarios, run boat loads of people through, and then take statistics on
what combination of signage works the best and what people like the best ...
something like that ... I don't attempt to understand the world of
psychology ... :-)
They want a system that is mostly non-interactive (so that they can have a
room full of people watch the scenario at the same time.) Essentially you
are driving in a car (which you don't see), you come up to a train crossing,
there is a train actually crossing in front of you, and the signage does the
appropriate thing ... in this case it's either a static sign, or a sign with
different combinations of blinking lights.
FlightGear seems like a perfect platform to rig up their experiment. It's
"free", it can run on just about any OS, it only requires a single computer,
we can script the view point motion, we can script and animate the signs
(this is daytime only), we can script and animate the train, it should be
all doable with some 3d models and a few nasal scripts. There's a guy here
who can do the environment model and the signage. I'm planning to set up
the xml animation files and do the nasal scripting.
So my question is this ... to save us some time, does anyone out there have
a 3d train model in their back pocket they would be willing to contribute to
FlightGear? I'm thinking diesel locomotive, some sort of box/cargo cars,
something in plausibly north american markings. The train will be
travelling in a perfectly straight line across perfectly level tracks so we
don't have to worry about the complex linkages between the cars ... the
whole train can be animated as a single model, but it would be nice if the
wheels spun relative to the train speed.
Thanks,
Curt.
--
Curtis Olson - University of Minnesota - FlightGear Project
http://baron.flightgear.org/~curt/ http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/
http://www.flightgear.org
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