For the vast majority of players, the Grand Theft Auto series has always been known for all kinds of chaotic criminal behavior: players can run amok on city streets, steal vehicles from pedestrian NPCs at will, then speed around causing various kinds of harm and committing all sorts of misdeeds that openly defy public authority. However, a group of researchers recently began using Grand Theft Auto 5 to try to improve real-world road safety, and even hope to save lives through it.
According to 《BBCIn a roundup report by the website, road safety experts from research institutions and universities in four countries around the world have begun to realize in recent years that Grand Theft Auto V has a detailed and realistic traffic environment and physics, and they have treated this open-world game—which has sold 230 million copies worldwide—as a “research tool” that could help them further improve road safety.
Even though 13 years have passed since its release, Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto V still has a remarkably complete and detailed traffic system and weather variations, allowing researchers to conduct road safety experiments in a fully virtual environment. In addition, compared with other expensive professional driving simulators, Grand Theft Auto V also offers a massive virtual world that they can dive straight into, not to mention that the game also includes a full first-person view feature.
In response, Julius Schöning, a professor of engineering and computer science at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences in Germany, said that although Grand Theft Auto V does not force players to obey traffic rules, this is precisely why players can decide for themselves to simulate various traffic safety scenarios.
To conduct this test, the research team made some modifications to Grand Theft Auto V, allowing the game to link with a stationary “simulated bicycle” in order to test a range of new safety technologies that could protect cyclists. These include a device mounted on the bicycle handlebars that warns cyclists of vehicles approaching from behind through vibrations, with the intensity increasing as the vehicle gets closer; another is a vibrating vest that can likewise detect nearby approaching vehicles.
Volunteers participating in the study were able to sit on a stationary bicycle and simulate the experience of riding through the streets of “Los Santos” in Grand Theft Auto V. During the study, volunteers also encountered sudden situations such as large trucks roaring past extremely close by. According to the final experimental results, both devices did indeed work, issuing warnings in real time when danger approached, but it is worth noting that there are currently no plans for these two devices to become mass-produced products.
In addition to German technical universities, a research team from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands chose to use eye-tracking technology to study cyclists’ visual responses to various hazards in Grand Theft Auto V, including car doors suddenly opening and vehicles suddenly pulling out of parking spaces, hoping to help real-world city planners design safer roads and intersections.
On the other hand, even Korea’s Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has begun using crash scenes from Grand Theft Auto V to train Korean autonomous vehicle AI systems, teaching them to identify drivers with dangerous driving behavior as quickly as possible and to try to avoid possible collisions. In addition, a research team from Eastern Michigan University in the United States designed nine dangerous scenarios in the game to test the judgment of a road safety AI decision-making system, and the final simulation results showed that the system could potentially reduce potential loss of life by about 24%.
Although this series of road safety experiments based on Grand Theft Auto 5 currently remains almost entirely at the conceptual stage, it still demonstrates other possibilities for this Rockstar Games classic beyond gameplay. As for Grand Theft Auto 6, which will officially launch next week, it is bound to deliver more polished visuals and details, meaning related experiments may also be fully upgraded again in the future.
Source: KOCPC Chinese