Virtual Reality based Study to Analyse Pedestrian Attitude towards Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

What are pedestrian attitudes towards driverless vehicles that have no human driver? In this paper, we use virtual reality to simulate a virtual scene where pedestrians interact with driverless vehicles. This was an exploratory study where 15 users encounter a driverless vehicle at a crosswalk in the virtual scene. Data was collected in the form of video and audio recordings, semi-structured interview and participant sketches to explain the crosswalk scenes they experience. An interaction design framework for vehicle-pedestrian interaction in an autonomous vehicle has been suggested which can be used to design and model driverless vehicle behaviour before the autonomous vehicle technology is deployed widely.