To ensure pedestrian friendly streets in the era of automated vehicles, reassessment of current policies, practices, design, rules and regulations of urban areas is of importance. This study investigates pedestrian crossing behaviour, as an important element of urban dynamics that is expected to be affected by the presence of automated vehicles. For this purpose, an interpretable machine learning framework is proposed to explore factors affecting pedestrians' wait time before crossing mid-block crosswalks in the presence of automated vehicles. To collect rich behavioural data, we developed a dynamic and immersive virtual reality experiment, with 180 participants from a heterogeneous population in 4 different locations in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Pedestrian wait time behaviour is then analyzed using a data-driven Cox Proportional Hazards (CPH) model, in which the linear combination of the covariates is replaced by a flexible non-linear deep neural network. The proposed model achieved a 5% improvement in goodness of fit, but more importantly, enabled us to incorporate a richer set of covariates. A game theoretic based interpretability method is used to understand the contribution of different covariates to the time pedestrians wait before crossing. Results show that the presence of automated vehicles on roads, wider lane widths, high density on roads, limited sight distance, and lack of walking habits are the main contributing factors to longer wait times. Our study suggested that, to move towards pedestrian-friendly urban areas, national level educational programs for children, enhanced safety measures for seniors, promotion of active modes of transportation, and revised traffic rules and regulations should be considered.
Level of emotional arousal of one's body changes in response to external stimuli in an environment. Given the risks involved while crossing streets, particularly at unsignalized mid-block crosswalks, one can expect a change in the stress level of pedestrians. In this study, we investigate the levels and changes in pedestrian stress, under different road crossing scenarios in immersive virtual reality. To measure the stress level of pedestrians, we used Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) sensors. To collect the required data for the model, Virtual Immersive Reality Environment (VIRE) tool is used, wh…
This paper analyzes the distracted pedestrians' waiting time before crossing the road in three conditions: 1) not distracted, 2) distracted with a smartphone and 3) distracted with a smartphone in the presence of virtual flashing LED lights on the crosswalk as a safety measure. For the means of data collection, we adapted an in-house developed virtual immersive reality environment (VIRE). A total of 42 volunteers participated in the experiment. Participants' positions and head movements were recorded and used to calculate walking speeds, acceleration and deceleration rates, surrogate safety me…
A novel head-mounted virtual immersive/interactive reality environment (VIRE) is utilized to evaluate the behaviour of participants in three pedestrian road crossing conditions while 1) not distracted, 2) distracted with a smartphone, and 3) distracted with a smartphone with a virtually implemented safety measure on the road. Forty-two volunteers participated in our research who completed thirty successful (complete crossing) trials in blocks of ten trials for each crossing condition. For the two distracted conditions, pedestrians are engaged in a maze-solving game on a virtual smartphone, whi…
A driving simulator was created using commercially available 3 degree of freedom motion platform (DOFreality H3) and a virtual reality head-mounted display (Oculus CV1). Using virtual reality headset as the visual simulation system with low-cost moving base platform allowed us to create a high-fidelity driving simulator with minimal cost and space. A custom motion cueing algorithm was used to minimize visuo-vestibular conflict, and simulator sickness questionnaire (SSQ) was used to measure progression of simulator sickness over time while driving on a highway environment.
In this paper, we describe the development and operating principles of an immersive virtual reality (VR) visualisation environment that is designed around the use of consumer VR headsets in an existing wide area motion capture suite. We present two case studies in the application areas of visualisation of scientific and engineering data. Each of these case studies utilise a different render engine, namely a custom engine for one case and a commercial game engine for the other. The advantages and appropriateness of each approach are discussed along with suggestions for future work.
In this position paper, we aim to spark more discussions surrounding the use of empathy as the intended outcome of many studies on immersive virtual reality experiences. As a construct, empathy has many significant flaws that may lead to unintended and negative outcomes, going against our original goal of employing these technologies for the betterment of society. We highlight the possible advantages of designing for rational compassion instead, and propose alternative research directions and outcome measurements for immersive virtual reality that urgently warrant our attention.
Injuries and fatalities for vulnerable road users, especially bicyclists and pedestrians, are on the rise. To better inform design for vulnerable road users, we need to conduct more studies to evaluate how bicyclist and pedestrian behavior and physiological states change in different roadway designs and contextual settings. Previous research highlights the advantages of Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) in conducting bicyclist and pedestrian studies. These environments do not put participants at risk of getting injured, are low-cost compared to on-road or naturalistic studies and allow resea…
Stated preference experiments have been known to suffer from the lack of realism. This issue is particularly visible when the scenario doesn't have a well understood prior reference e.g. in case of the autonomous vehicles related scenarios. We present Virtual Immersive Reality Environment (VIRE) that is capable of developing highly realistic, immersive, and interactive choice scenario. We demonstrate the use of VIRE in the pedestrian preferences related to autonomous vehicles and associated infrastructure changes on urban streets of Montréal. The results are compared with predominantly used ap…
Bionic vision is a rapidly advancing field aimed at developing visual neuroprostheses ('bionic eyes') to restore useful vision to people who are blind. However, a major outstanding challenge is predicting what people 'see' when they use their devices. The limited field of view of current devices necessitates head movements to scan the scene, which is difficult to simulate on a computer screen. In addition, many computational models of bionic vision lack biological realism. To address these challenges, we propose to embed biologically realistic models of simulated prosthetic vision (SPV) in imm…
Software analytics in augmented reality (AR) is said to have great potential. One reason why this potential is not yet fully exploited may be usability problems of the AR user interfaces. We present an iterative and qualitative usability evaluation with 15 subjects of a state-of-the-art application for software analytics in AR. We could identify and resolve numerous usability issues. Most of them were caused by applying conventional user interface elements, such as dialog windows, buttons, and scrollbars. The used city visualization, however, did not cause any usability issues. Therefore, we a…
This is the preprint version of our paper on REHAB2015. This paper proposed a novel immersive entertainment system for the users of hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber. The system is a hybrid of hardware and software, the scheme is described in this paper. The hardware is combined by a HMD (i.e. virtual reality glasses shell), a smartphone and a waterproof bag. The software is able to transfer the stereoscopic images of the 3D game to the screen of the smartphone synchronously. The comparison and selection of the hardware are discussed according to the practical running scene of the clinical hyp…
Hand tracking has become an integral feature of recent generations of immersive virtual reality head-mounted displays. With the widespread adoption of this feature, hardware engineers and software developers are faced with an exciting array of opportunities and a number of challenges, mostly in relation to the human user. In this article, I outline what I see as the main possibilities for hand tracking to add value to immersive virtual reality as well as some of the potential challenges in the context of the psychology and neuroscience of the human user. It is hoped that this paper serves as a…
Bionic vision uses neuroprostheses to restore useful vision to people living with incurable blindness. However, a major outstanding challenge is predicting what people 'see' when they use their devices. The limited field of view of current devices necessitates head movements to scan the scene, which is difficult to simulate on a computer screen. In addition, many computational models of bionic vision lack biological realism. To address these challenges, we present VR-SPV, an open-source virtual reality toolbox for simulated prosthetic vision that uses a psychophysically validated computational…
In the complex manufacturing sector a considerable amount of resources are focused on developing new skills and training workers. In that context, increasing the effectiveness of those processes and reducing the investment required is an outstanding issue. In this paper we present an experiment that shows how modern Human Computer Interaction (HCI) metaphors such as collaborative mixed-reality can be used to transmit procedural knowledge and could eventually replace other forms of face-to-face training. We implement a real-time Immersive Augmented Reality (IAR) setup with see-through cameras t…
We use an immersive virtual reality environment to explore the intricate social cues that underlie non-verbal communication involved in a pedestrian's crossing decision. We "hack" non-verbal communication between pedestrian and vehicle by engineering a set of 15 vehicle trajectories, some of which follow social conventions and some that break them. By subverting social expectations of vehicle behavior we show that pedestrians may use vehicle kinematics to infer social intentions and not merely as the state of a moving object. We investigate human behavior in this virtual world by conducting a …
As virtual reality (VR) technologies have improved in the past decade, more research has investigated how they could support more effective communication in various contexts to improve collaboration and social connectedness. However, there was no literature to summarize the uniqueness VR provided and put forward guidance for designing social VR applications for better communication. To understand how VR has been designed and used to facilitate communication in different contexts, we conducted a systematic review of the studies investigating communication in social VR in the past ten years by f…
Recently, we developed a dynamic distributed end-to-end vehicle routing system (E2ECAV) using a network of intelligent intersections and level 5 CAVs (Djavadian & Farooq, 2018). The case study of the downtown Toronto Network showed that E2ECAV has the ability to maximize throughput and reduce travel time up to 40%. However, the efficiency of these new technologies relies on the acceptance of users in adapting to them and their willingness to give control fully or partially to CAVs. In this study a stated preference laboratory experiment is designed employing Virtual Reality Immersive Environme…
Photogrammetry is a science dealing with obtaining reliable information about physical objects using their imagery description. Recent advancements in the development of Virtual Reality (VR) can help to unlock the full potential offered by the digital 3D-reality models generated using the state-of-art photogrammetric technologies. These models are becoming a viable alternative for providing high-quality content for such immersive environment. Simultaneously, their analyses in VR could bring added-value to professionals working in various engineering and non-engineering settings and help in ext…
In the past few years, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies have experienced terrific improvements in both accessibility and hardware capabilities, encouraging the application of these devices across various domains. While researchers have demonstrated the possible advantages of AR and VR for certain data science tasks, it is still unclear how these technologies would perform in the context of exploratory data analysis (EDA) at large. In particular, we believe it is important to better understand which level of immersion EDA would concretely benefit from, and to quantif…
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA（美国密歇根大学安娜堡分校机械工程系）
For safe navigation around pedestrians, automated vehicles (AVs) need to plan their motion by accurately predicting pedestrians trajectories over long time horizons. Current approaches to AV motion planning around crosswalks predict only for short time horizons (1-2 s) and are based on data from pedestrian interactions with human-driven vehicles (HDVs). In this paper, we develop a hybrid systems model that uses pedestrians gap acceptance behavior and constant velocity dynamics for long-term pedestrian trajectory prediction when interacting with AVs. Results demonstrate the applicability of the…
Enhancing Safety in Automated Ports: A Virtual Reality Study of Pedestrian-Autonomous Vehicle Interactions under Time Pressure, Visual Constraints, and Varying Vehicle Size
In immersive augmented reality (IAR), users can wear a head-mounted display to see computer-generated images superimposed to their view of the world. IAR was shown to be beneficial across several domains, e.g., automotive, medicine, gaming and engineering, with positive impacts on, e.g., collaboration and communication. We think that IAR bears a great potential for software engineering but, as of yet, this research area has been neglected. In this vision paper, we elicit potentials and obstacles for the use of IAR in software engineering. We identify possible areas that can be supported with I…
We study the performance and user experience of two popular mainstream text entry devices, desktop keyboards and touchscreen keyboards, for use in Virtual Reality (VR) applications. We discuss the limitations arising from limited visual feedback, and examine the efficiency of different strategies of use. We analyze a total of 24 hours of typing data in VR from 24 participants and find that novice users are able to retain about 60% of their typing speed on a desktop keyboard and about 40-45\% of their typing speed on a touchscreen keyboard. We also find no significant learning effects, indicati…
Studies on prospective memory (PM) predominantly assess either event- or time-based PM by implementing non-ecological laboratory-based tasks. The results deriving from these paradigms have provided findings that are discrepant with ecologically valid research paradigms that converge on the complexity and cognitive demands of everyday tasks. The Virtual Reality Everyday Assessment Lab (VR-EAL), an immersive virtual reality (VR) neuropsychological battery with enhanced ecological validity, was implemented to assess everyday event- and time-based PM, as well as the influence of other cognitive fu…
Mobile navigation apps are among the most used mobile applications and are often used as a baseline to evaluate new mobile navigation technologies in field studies. As field studies often introduce external factors that are hard to control for, we investigate how pedestrian navigation methods can be evaluated in virtual reality (VR). We present a study comparing navigation methods in real life (RL) and VR to evaluate if VR environments are a viable alternative to RL environments when it comes to testing these. In a series of studies, participants navigated a real and a virtual environment usin…
A fundamental challenge in teaching robots is to provide an effective interface for human teachers to demonstrate useful skills to a robot. This challenge is exacerbated in dexterous manipulation, where teaching high-dimensional, contact-rich behaviors often require esoteric teleoperation tools. In this work, we present Holo-Dex, a framework for dexterous manipulation that places a teacher in an immersive mixed reality through commodity VR headsets. The high-fidelity hand pose estimator onboard the headset is used to teleoperate the robot and collect demonstrations for a variety of general-pur…
Research examining older adults interactions with Virtual Reality (VR) and the impact of social VR experiences on outcomes such as social engagement has been limited, especially among older adults. This multi-site pilot study evaluated the feasibility and acceptability of a novel social virtual reality (VR) program that paired older adults from different geographic locations (New York City, Tallahassee, and Ithaca, N.Y) who engaged in virtual travel and productive engagement activities together. The sample included 36 individuals aged 60 and older, 25 percent of whom had cognitive impairment (…
Humans make their evacuation decisions first at strategic/tactical levels, deciding their exit and route choice and then at operational level, navigating to a way-point, avoiding collisions. What influences an individuals at tactical level is of importance, for modelers to design a high fidelity simulation or for safety engineers to create efficient designs/codes. Does an unlit exit sign dissuades individual(s) to avoid a particular exit/route and vice versa? What effect does the crowd's choices have on individual's decision making? To answer these questions, we studied the effect of exit sign…
