Naughty Agents Can Be Helpful: Training Drivers to Handle Dangerous Situations in Virtual Reality

Recently many car driving simulators have been developed and used for educational purposes. They can provide special training opportunities that are not available frequently in reality. However, currently existing simulators often rely on predefined situations and scenarios. Training students to deal with spontaneously occurring dangerous traffic situations is difficult when using hard wired "emergency" situations that occur in a predictable manner. In this paper we present a new approach to provide special learning opportunities. We adopt intelligent agent technologies to develop the "problem creator", a pedagogical agent who can deliberately cause dangerous situations. Introducing the problem creator into our collaborative 3D virtual car driving environment makes it unpredictable when, where, and what type of abnormal situations the students will be confronted with. These irregularly occurring challenges model the reality of car driving well.