Representation of Light of Aids to Navigation in Ship Handling Simulator

We have aimed to improve safety of ship navigation at night and studied appropriate passage routes on ship handling simulator taking Kanmon Passage as an example. As we enhance recognition of the passage route, we prepared several ways such as changing character of light buoys or corresponding/cascading buoys lighting. We have represented lights of aids to navigation such as buoys and lighthouses accurately in our ship handling simulator and executed simulator experiments to test those ways. To represent accurate representation of lights, we have made several CGI objects based on their colors, their luminosity and luminance of CGI on screen. A buoy chooses appropriate object automatically from them according to its own luminosity and a distance between the buoy and a viewpoint. Besides we have added equations of atmospheric transmittance to our program and realized visibility of light on our simulator. We discuss those methods in this paper.