So.. I had this idea a while back when people first starting talking about cars having to decide who dies and who doesn’t when an accident is inevitable. I wanted to prove that it wasn’t as cut and dry as some of the articles on the web were saying, and specifically I was looking at this:
http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ (Click Judge to Play)
It’s neat, but I wanted to show that there are more than 2 choices at any point in time, and that cars can be programmed to do things that we’re not thinking of, so, what would happen if I gave people the tools to program cars, and then placed them in these situations again with all the variables of the real-world (or a good deal of these at least) and this is what I came up with:
The missions start out fairly basic just to get the player familiar with the interface, and then gradually add in props and obstacles like traffic cones, cardboard cutout people, and other AI controlled cars. The “world” is a test track inspired by “MCity,” a fake town built by the University of Michigan to test self driving cars.
There’s plenty of work to be done still, and I’m planning to have at least 16 assignments done before release, but I’ll put up the beta version here soon.
EDIT: Here’s the link to the latest version of this game –