Development of an Effective Pedestrian Simulator for Research

According to the US Department of Transportation, in 2013 14 % of all traffic fatalities were pedestrians. In Japan, 38.4 % of 2015 traffic fatalities were pedestrians. Studying pedestrian behavior is an important step in preventing pedestrian fatalities on the road. However, to investigate pedestrian behavior, several factors need to be considered. First and foremost, the safety of the participants must be assured. Second, the study environment needs to be controlled to prevent confounding variables and allow for repeated trials. Finally, the costs to develop and perform the study must also be minimized. To address these obstacles, we propose the implementation of a virtual reality (VR)-based simulator for studies of behavior and task performance with full motion. This simulator is composed of a Unity 5 environment, Oculus Rift VR headset, and Kinect or motion capture based position tracking. In this paper, we will discuss the development of the simulator, limitations, and future work.