# Portobello: Extending Driving Simulation from the Lab to the Road

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08061 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08061/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Seeing What the Vehicle Sees: Video-Augmented Virtual Reality for Physical Autonomous Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13224/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In automotive user interface design, testing often starts with lab-based driving simulators and migrates toward on-road studies to mitigate risks. Mixed reality (XR) helps translate virtual study designs to the real road to increase ecological validity. However, researchers rarely run the same study in both in-lab and on-road simulators due to the challenges of replicating studies in both physical and virtual worlds. To provide a common infrastructure to port in-lab study designs on-road, we built a platform-portable infrastructure, Portobello, to enable us to run twinned physical-virtual studies. As a proof-of-concept, we extended the on-road simulator XR-OOM with Portobello. We ran a within-subjects, autonomous-vehicle crosswalk cooperation study (N=32) both in-lab and on-road to investigate study design portability and platform-driven influences on study outcomes. To our knowledge, this is the first system that enables the twinning of studies originally designed for in-lab simulators to be carried out in an on-road platform.