ABSTRACT
It all started in 1995 with the front portion of a Ford Orion (see Figure 1.1). The rear potion, sadly, did not fit through the narrow doorway in Southampton University’s Murray Building through which it needed to be squeezed. Nor did the roof, which had to be cut off and reattached. Our first driving simulator used the partially reassembled remains of the Ford Orion, a first-generation Epson LCD projector, an Archimedes RISC computer and an enthusiastic computer programmer who built the simulation software from scratch, was able to diagnose faults by looking at the raw machine code and made all the other vehicles in the simulation look like Rover 200s. As a facility it was crude but surprisingly effective. Remember, in 1995 driving simulators, as we know them today, were not common.
