MAD-IVE: Multi-Agent Distributed Immersive Virtual Environments for Vulnerable Road User Research—Potential, Challenges, and Requirements
Publication: Computing in Civil Engineering 2023
ABSTRACT
The number of fatalities involving vulnerable road users (VRUs) has reached record highs in recent years. Due to the complex and costly process of naturalistic studies, there is a lack of understanding on the behavior of road users when they interact with each other in different environments. However, advancements in virtual reality have made it possible to conduct distributed simulations, enabling multiple users to participate in a virtual re-creation of an entire system. This development has promising applications in human-factor research, especially in evaluating behavioral responses in complex environments. This paper presents a roadmap outlining major technical challenges and requirements for real-time distributed and multi-user simulation in the context of road users’ safety along with a case study of distributed multi-agent VR. This paper contributes to the field by providing feasibility benchmarks and research details on low-cost distributed technology for simulating VRU interactions.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this chapter.
REFERENCES
Al-Jundi, H. A., and Tanbour, E. Y. (2022). “A framework for fidelity evaluation of immersive virtual reality systems.” Virtual Reality, 26(3), 1103–1122.
Bazilinskyy, P., Kooijman, L., Dodou, D., and de Winter, J. C. (2020). “Coupled simulator for research on the interaction between pedestrians and (automated) vehicles.” Driving Simulation Conference Europe. Antibes, France.
Bhagavathula, R., Williams, B., Owens, J., and Gibbons, R. (2018). “The reality of virtual reality: A comparison of pedestrian behavior in real and virtual environments.” Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, Vol. 62, SAGE Publications Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA, 2056–2060.
Guo, X., Angulo, A., Robartes, E., Chen, T. D., and Heydarian, A. (2022). “Orclsim: A system architecture for studying bicyclist and pedestrian physiological behavior through immersive virtual environments.” Journal of advanced transportation, 2022.
Guo, X., Angulo, A., Tavakoli, A., Robartes, E., Chen, T. D., and Heydarian, A. (2023a). “Rethinking infrastructure design: evaluating pedestrians and vrus’ psychophysiological and behavioral responses to different roadway designs.” Scientific Reports, 13(1),4278.
Guo, X., Tavakoli, A., Angulo, A., Robartes, E., Chen, T. D., and Heydarian, A. (2023b). “Psycho-physiological measures on a bicycle simulator in immersive virtual environments: how protected/curbside bike lanes may improve perceived safety.” Transportation research part F: traffic psychology and behaviour, 92, 317–336.
Hamad, A. (2021). Two wheelistic: Development of a high-fidelity virtual reality cycling simulator for transportation safety research. Ph.D. thesis, Ph.D. thesis.
Hübner, M., Feierle, A., Rettenmaier, M., and Bengler, K. (2022). “External communication of automated vehicles in mixed traffic: Addressing the right human interaction partner in multi-agent simulation.” Transportation research part F: traffic psychology and behaviour, 87, 365–378.
Liu, S., Xu, X., and Claypool, M. (2022). “A survey and taxonomy of latency compensation techniques for network computer games.” ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 54(11s), 1–34.
McGill, M., Ng, A., and Brewster, S. (2017). “I am the passenger: how visual motion cues can influence sickness for in-car vr.” Proceedings of the 2017 chi conference on human factors in computing systems, 5655–5668.
O’Hern, S., Oxley, J., and Stevenson, M. (2017). “Validation of a bicycle simulator for road safety research.” Accident Analysis & Prevention, 100, 53–58.
Pan, X., and Hamilton, A. F. D. C. (2018). “Why and how to use virtual reality to study human social interaction: The challenges of exploring a new research landscape.” British Journal of Psychology, 109(3), 395–417.
Parthasarathy, V., Simiscuka, A. A., O’Connor, N., and Muntean, G.-M. (2020). “Performance evaluation of a multi-user virtual reality platform.” 2020 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC), IEEE, 934–939.
Pöhlmann, K. M. T., Auf Der Heyde, M. S. K., Li, G., Verstraten, F., Brewster, S. A., and McGill, M. (2022). “Can visual motion presented in a vr headset reduce motion sickness for vehicle passengers?” Adjunct Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications, 114–118.
Rangelova, S., and Andre, E. (2018). “A survey on simulation sickness in driving applications with virtual reality head-mounted displays.” PRESENCE: Virtual and Augmented Reality, 27(1), 15–31.
Riegler, A., Riener, A., and Holzmann, C. (2021). “A systematic review of virtual reality applications for automated driving: 2009–2020.” Frontiers in human dynamics, 3, 689856.
Schneider, S., and Bengler, K. (2020). “Virtually the same? analysing pedestrian behaviour by means of virtual reality.” Transportation research part F: traffic psychology and behavior, 68, 231–256.
Schneider, S., Maruhn, P., Dang, N.-T., Pala, P., Cavallo, V., and Bengler, K. (2022). “Pedestrian crossing decisions in virtual environments: behavioral validity in caves and head-mounted displays.” Human factors, 64(7), 1210–1226.
Schwebel, D. C., Gaines, J., and Severson, J. (2008). “Validation of virtual reality as a tool to understand and prevent child pedestrian injury.” Accident Analysis & Prevention, 40(4), 1394–1400.
Sra, M., Jain, D., Caetano, A. P., Calvo, A., Hilton, E., and Schmandt, C. (2016). “Resolving spatial variation and allowing spectator participation in multiplayer vr.” Adjunct Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 221–222.
Subramanyam, S., Viola, I., Jansen, J., Alexiou, E., Hanjalic, A., and Cesar, P. (2022). “Evaluating the impact of tiled user-adaptive real-time point cloud streaming on vr remote communication.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.04906.
Tabone, W., De Winter, J., Ackermann, C., Bärgman, J., Baumann, M., Deb, S., Emmenegger, C., Habibovic, A., Hagenzieker, M., and Hancock, P. A. (2021). “Vulnerable road users and the coming wave of automated vehicles: Expert perspectives.” Transportation research interdisciplinary perspectives, 9, 100293.
Thies, J., Zollhöfer, M., Stamminger, M., Theobalt, C., and Nießner, M. (2016). “Facevr: Real-time facial reenactment and eye gaze control in virtual reality.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.03151.
Weissker, T., Bimberg, P., and Froehlich, B. (2021). “An overview of group navigation in multi-user virtual reality.” 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), IEEE, 363–369.
Yang, J., Chen, T., Qin, F., Lam, M. S., and Landay, J. A. (2022). “Hybridtrak: Adding full-body tracking to vr using an off-the-shelf webcam.” Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13.
Zhang, Y., Chen, L., Jiang, W., Gong, J., Shen, J., Chu, M., Li, C., Pan, Y., Shi, Y., and Luo, N. (2022). “A high-fidelity simulation framework for potential safety benefits estimation of cooperative pedestrian perception.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.08731.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Computing in Civil Engineering 2023
Pages: 1113 - 1120
History
Published online: Jan 25, 2024
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Business management
- Case studies
- Engineering fundamentals
- Feasibility studies
- Field tests
- Highway and road management
- Highway transportation
- Highways and roads
- Human and behavioral factors
- Infrastructure
- Infrastructure vulnerability
- Methodology (by type)
- Practice and Profession
- Research methods (by type)
- Tests (by type)
- Traffic accidents
- Traffic engineering
- Traffic management
- Traffic safety
- Transportation engineering
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.