RIDERS: Road Inspection & Driver Simulation

The main goal of this paper was to evaluate the use of a low cost immersive driving simulator to improve the teaching learning process of the Transport Infrastructure undergraduate course. The driving simulator that was developed in a virtual reality environment to assist both the teaching of engineering and the research on road safety. An experiment was conducted in Transport Infrastructure 1 course for Civil Engineering students in a Brazilian university. The students developed a geometric design of a road that was posteriorly modeled in 3D and provided in simulator. Students piloted a vehicle in the immersive simulator in the same road that they designed. Subsequently the usability of the system was assessed by the SUS metric (System Usability Scale). We performed an evaluation with 52 users and the SUS metric that we found was of 73% assuring a degree of usability above average and demonstrating that the immersive system is good to be used as a complementary tool in the learning of transport infrastructure.