A Virtual Reality Program to Improve Child Pedestrians’ Safety at Street-Crossing Scenarios

Abstract

A training program was designed and developed for school-going children of 7-12 years old in order to help them improve their understanding of safety rules at critical street-crossing scenarios. The training is constructed of two modules that take place on two different platforms. The first one is a bilingual instruction-based video presentation that demonstrates street crossing safety rules and is viewed on a digital display. The second one (virtual "game" ) takes place in a virtual environment (VE), and the trainee wears a virtual reality (VR) head-mounted device (Oculus Quest) to physically walk on 30-ft long marked and unmarked crosswalks to put the lesson into practice. Eight types of scenarios called "levels" were developed to test and improve the player's decision-making ability. In addition, an experiment was designed to test the efficacy of the program. Trials were run, where a participant watched the video presentation between the two times they were allowed to play the game. The process required an average of 40 minutes per participant to complete. No participants went through simulation sickness according to the Simulation Sickness Questionnaire provided, and an experience survey conducted at the end of the trials showed that all participants found the training program natural and informative.