Interacting with a Virtual Cyclist in Mixed Reality Affects Pedestrian Walking

Abstract

When walking in shared traffic spaces, the nearby presence and movement of other pedestrians and cyclists can prompt individuals to make speed and path adjustments to avoid potential collisions. The study of such collision avoidance strategies in virtual settings allows for the controlled scaling of environmental complexity that are present in a real situation, while ensuring pedestrians safety. Our pilot study in this work makes an early effort towards understanding the influence of cyclist movements on human walking using mixed reality (MR). On this account, the collision avoidance behavior of pedestrians crossing the path of a moving virtual cyclist avatar was examined. This was done by analyzing the temporal and spatial characteristics of the participants walking trajectory using the speed profiles and Post Encroachment Time (PET) metric. The early results from our pilot study demonstrates that mixed reality cyclist experiments can be used to study pedestrian-cyclist interactions. Furthermore, for all interactions that were noted in the study, a significant proportion of participants decided to cross the virtual cyclist, while others preferring to give the right of way. We also discuss our current findings, insights and implications of studying pedestrian behaviours using virtual cyclists.