Patent ID: 8907950

Claim:
A driving simulation apparatus comprising: a processor; and a memory which stores a plurality of instructions, which when executed by the processor, cause the processor to execute; an input instruction that receives an input of an operation instruction with respect to a vehicle in a virtual environment; a vehicle simulation instruction that calculates a position and an orientation of the vehicle in the virtual environment in real-time in accordance with the input of the operation instruction; a camera state calculation instruction that obtains a viewpoint position and a viewing direction of a on-vehicle wide-angle camera based on the position and the orientation of the vehicle; and a wide-angle camera simulation instruction including; an intermediate image rendering instruction that generates a plurality of intermediate images by, for a plurality of intermediate projection planes that cover a given field of view from the on-vehicle wide-angle camera, performing perspective projection on the virtual environment from both the viewpoint position and the viewing direction of the on-vehicle wide-angle camera that are calculated by the camera state calculation unit; and a video rendering instruction that generates a on-vehicle wide-angle camera video by deforming and compositing the plurality of intermediate images, wherein the intermediate image rendering instruction generates the plurality of intermediate images by performing perspective projection on the virtual environment from the viewpoint position and the viewing direction of the on-vehicle wide-angle camera, with use of, as the plurality of intermediate projection planes, at least two planes among six planes of a cube in which the viewpoint of the on-vehicle camera is included, the driving simulation apparatus further comprises a direction vector attachment instruction that, for each node of a two-dimensional mesh arranged on a screen of the on-vehicle wide-angle camera video to be generated, calculates a direction vector that associates the node and a position on an intermediate projection plane from among the plurality of intermediate projection planes, based on the parameter obtained based on a relationship between a direction of an incident light that incidents the lens of the on-vehicle wide-angle camera and a two-dimensional position of an image that is formed by the incident light which transmits through the lens on a capturing plane of the on-vehicle wide-angle camera, wherein the video rendering instruction generates the on-vehicle wide-angle camera video by mapping textures of the plurality of intermediate images to the two-dimensional mesh with use of the direction vectors.