Enhancing Safety in Automated Ports: A Virtual Reality Study of Pedestrian-Autonomous Vehicle Interactions under Time Pressure, Visual Constraints, and Varying Vehicle Size
Yuan Che, Mun On Wong, Xiaowei Gao, Haoyang Liang, Yun Ye
Autonomous driving improves traffic efficiency but presents safety challenges in complex port environments. This study investigates how environmental factors, traffic factors, and pedestrian characteristics influence interaction safety between autonomous vehicles and pedestrians in ports. Using virtual reality (VR) simulations of typical port scenarios, 33 participants completed pedestrian crossing tasks under varying visibility, vehicle sizes, and time pressure conditions. Results indicate that low-visibility conditions, partial occlusions and larger vehicle sizes significantly increase perceived risk, prompting pedestrians to wait longer and accept larger gaps. Specifically, pedestrians tended to accept larger gaps and waited longer when interacting with large autonomous truck platoons, reflecting heightened caution due to their perceived threat. However, local obstructions also reduce post-encroachment time, compressing safety margins. Individual attributes such as age, gender, and driving experience further shape decision-making, while time pressure undermines compensatory behaviors and increases risk. Based on these findings, safety strategies are proposed, including installing wide-angle cameras at multiple viewpoints, enabling real-time vehicle-infrastructure communication, enhancing port lighting and signage, and strengthening pedestrian safety training. This study offers practical recommendations for improving the safety and deployment of vision-based autonomous systems in port settings.
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…
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 …
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…
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…
eHMI for All -- Investigating the Effect of External Communication of Automated Vehicles on Pedestrians, Manual Drivers, and Cyclists in Virtual Reality
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…
Occlusion-induced risk and interventions in pedestrian-autonomous truck interactions on multi-lane roads: A virtual reality study
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Ningbo University（宁波大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Shanghai Maritime University（上海海事大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）
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 d…
Providing pedestrians and other vulnerable road users with a clear indication about a fully autonomous vehicle status and intentions is crucial to make them coexist. In the last few years, a variety of external interfaces have been proposed, leveraging different paradigms and technologies including vehicle-mounted devices (like LED panels), short-range on-road projections, and road infrastructure interfaces (e.g., special asphalts with embedded displays). These designs were experimented in different settings, using mockups, specially prepared vehicles, or virtual environments, with heterogeneo…
Mindscape: Research of high-information density street environments based on electroencephalogram recording and virtual reality head-mounted simulation
Virtual Reality has the potential to change the way we work. We envision the future office worker to be able to work productively everywhere solely using portable standard input devices and immersive head-mounted displays. Virtual Reality has the potential to enable this, by allowing users to create working environments of their choice and by relieving them from physical world limitations such as constrained space or noisy environments. In this article, we investigate opportunities and challenges for realizing this vision and discuss implications from recent findings of text entry in virtual r…
With the unprecedented shift towards automated urban environments in recent years, a new paradigm is required to study pedestrian behaviour. Studying pedestrian behaviour in futuristic scenarios requires modern data sources that consider both the Automated Vehicle (AV) and pedestrian perspectives. Current open datasets on AVs predominantly fail to account for the latter, as they do not include an adequate number of events and associated details that involve pedestrian and vehicle interactions. To address this issue, we propose using Virtual Reality (VR) data as a complementary resource to curr…
Vehicle pedestrian communication is extremely important when developing autonomy for an autonomous vehicle. Enabling bidirectional nonverbal communication between pedestrians and autonomous vehicles will lead to an improvement of pedestrians' safety in autonomous driving. If a pedestrian wants to communicate, the autonomous vehicle should provide feedback to the human about what it is about to do. The user study presented in this paper investigated several possible options for an external vehicle display for effective nonverbal communication between an autonomous vehicle and a human. The resul…
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…
An ordered-logit model is developed to study the effects of Automated Vehicles (AVs) in the traffic mix on the average stress level of a pedestrian when crossing an urban street at mid-block. Information collected from a galvanic skin resistance sensor and virtual reality experiments are transformed into a dataset with interpretable average stress levels (low, medium, and high) and geometric, traffic, and environmental conditions. Modelling results indicate a decrease in average stress level with the increase in the percentage of AVs in the traffic mix.
With the further development of highly automated vehicles, drivers will engage in non-related tasks while being driven. Still, drivers have to take over control when requested by the car. Here the question arises, how potentially distracted drivers get back into the control-loop quickly and safely when the car requests a takeover. To investigate effective human-machine interactions in mobile, versatile, and cost-efficient setup is needed. We developed a virtual reality toolkit for the Unity 3D game engine containing all necessary code and assets to enable fast adaptations to various human-mach…
In this contribution, we propose a new framework to evaluate pedestrian simula-tions by using Extended Range Telepresence. Telepresence is used as a virtual reality walking simulator, which provides the user with a realistic impression of being present and walking in a virtual environment that is much larger than the real physical environment, in which the user actually walks. The validation of the simulation is performed by comparing motion data of the telepresent user with simulated data at some points of the simulation. The use of haptic feedback from the simulation makes the framework suit…
Pedestrian's road crossing behaviour is one of the important aspects of urban dynamics that will be affected by the introduction of autonomous vehicles. In this study we introduce DeepSurvival, a novel framework for estimating pedestrian's waiting time at unsignalized mid-block crosswalks in mixed traffic conditions. We exploit the strengths of deep learning in capturing the nonlinearities in the data and develop a cox proportional hazard model with a deep neural network as the log-risk function. An embedded feature selection algorithm for reducing data dimensionality and enhancing the interpr…
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Dongguk University（东国大学）
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) can prevent collisions by understanding pedestrian intention. We conducted a virtual reality experiment with 39 participants and measured crossing times (seconds) and head orientation (yaw degrees). We manipulated AV yielding behavior (no-yield, slow-yield, and fast-yield) and the AV size (small, medium, and large). Using machine learning approach, we classified head orientation change of pedestrians by time into 6 clusters of patterns. Results indicate that pedestrian head orientation change was influenced by AV yielding behavior as well as the size of the AV. Partic…
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, York University（约克大学电气工程与计算机科学系）；York University（约克大学）；Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science（电气工程与计算机科学系）；Toronto（多伦多）；ON, Canada（加拿大安大略省）
One of the major challenges that autonomous cars are facing today is driving in urban environments. To make it a reality, autonomous vehicles require the ability to communicate with other road users and understand their intentions. Such interactions are essential between the vehicles and pedestrians as the most vulnerable road users. Understanding pedestrian behavior, however, is not intuitive and depends on various factors such as demographics of the pedestrians, traffic dynamics, environmental conditions, etc. In this paper, we identify these factors by surveying pedestrian behavior studies,…
Virtual and Augmented Reality have the potential to change information work. The ability to modify the workers senses can transform everyday environments into a productive office, using portable head-mounted displays combined with conventional interaction devices, such as keyboards and tablets. While a stream of better, cheaper and lighter HMDs have been introduced for consumers in recent years, there are still many challenges to be addressed to allow this vision to become reality. This chapter summarizes the state of the art in the field of extended reality for knowledge work in everyday envi…
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…
Effect of Haptic Feedback on Avoidance Behavior and Visual Exploration in Dynamic VR Pedestrian Environment
Department of Mechano-informatics, The University of Tokyo（机械信息学系，东京大学）；Department of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University（电气工程系，斯坦福大学）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Stanford University（机械工程系，斯坦福大学）
Cross-cultural analysis of pedestrian group behaviour influence on crossing decisions in interactions with autonomous vehicles
Universidad de Alcalá（阿尔卡拉大学）；Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney（悉尼大学澳大利亚野外机器人中心）；European Commission, Joint Research Centre（欧盟委员会联合研究中心）
In this paper, we present a Virtual Reality (VR) based environment where the engineer interacts with incoming data from a fleet of aeroengines. This data takes the form of 3D computer-aided design (CAD) engine models coupled with characteristic plots for the subsystems of each engine. Both the plots and models can be interacted with and manipulated using speech or gestural input. The characteristic data is ported to a knowledge-based system underpinned by a knowledge-graph storing complex domain knowledge. This permits the system to respond to queries about the current state and health of each…
Virtual Reality (VR) technology has been shown to achieve remarkable results in multiple fields. Due to the nature of the immersive medium of Virtual Reality it logically follows that it can be used as a high-quality educational tool as it offers potentially a higher bandwidth than other mediums such as text, pictures and videos. This short paper illustrates the development of a climate change educational awareness application for virtual reality to simulate virtual scenes of local scenery and sea level rising until 2100 using prediction data. The paper also reports on the current in progress …
This article deals with the specific context of an autonomous car navigating in an urban center within a shared space between pedestrians and cars. The driver delegates the control to the autonomous system while remaining seated in the driver's seat. The proposed study aims at giving a first insight into the definition of human perception of space applied to vehicles by testing the existence of a personal space around the car.It aims at measuring proxemic information about the driver's comfort zone in such conditions.Proxemics, or human perception of space, has been largely explored when appli…
