FIVIS Bike Simulator for Training and Education

The FIVIS Bicycle Simulator is an immersive interactive gaming platform that can be used both for physical training and in traffic safety education.

The FIVIS Bicycle Simulator, a project from the Institute of Visual Computing at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University in Germany, was developed to improve bicycle safety and make training more fun. Simulators that can address locomotion with bikes are not as widely available as those built to simulate other vehicles like cars, airplanes and trains, even though the number of bicycle accidents is on the rise. This was one of the main reasons why the German team developed FIVIS. The bike simulator can be used both in training and in traffic and work safety education, and it is suitable for all age groups (children, adults and seniors).

The goal of the FIVIS project was to design a bike simulator that could simulate real ride situations within an immersive virtual setting. A test bicycle is mounted on a motion platform to provide a realistic simulation of various situations involving balance and turns. The user's visual field is delivered on multiple screens, and the virtual environment provides the information about the activity and motion of the bike. As the virtual rider pedals and steers the bike, his motion is recorded and processed to control the visualisation in front of him. The platform can deliver a semi-realistic experience of different surfaces, external forces and riding turns. The FIVIS platform also contains data acquired during real bike test rides, including forces and accelerations which, combined with the feedback system, allows the system to mirror activities on the platform within the virtual setting on the screen.

The FIVIS Bicycle Simulator has allowed researchers to conduct the first ever study of the correlation between the visually perceived motion and the physically generated motion. The simulator can also facilitate psychological experiments and help researchers study stress factors and human perception because the platform makes it easy to manipulate auditory and visual cues on the display screen.

To see the FIVIS Bicycle Simulator in action, watch the video.