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Is it possible to return observations that a well equipped driverless car would receive (e.g. lidar, sonar, multiple cameras, IMU, etc)?

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It seems like it would almost be easier to hire some of rockstar's game designers and build a realistic self driving car environment from the ground up, given the amount of funding OpenAI has

Nah. This is second-system syndrome thinking. Definitely easier to modify the existing huge working system.

GTAV is closed source

This could have been done completely open source, but you wouldn't have gotten all the extras that GTA V gives you (basically the world and all of its objects, npcs, etc - which is a huge plus).

For instance, they could have gone with TORCS:

http://torcs.sourceforge.net/

...or Stunt Rally:

http://stuntrally.tuxfamily.org/

...or Trigger Rally:

http://trigger-rally.sourceforge.net/

(i'm not sure - but Stunt Rally and Trigger Rally may be from the same Trigger codebase)

Trigger Rally also has a webgl version:

https://github.com/CodeArtemis/TriggerRally

All of this is just to say that if it were wanted, a completely open-source driving AI simulator could be easily made.

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