Developing a Virtual Reality Bicycle Simulator in Unity for Traffic Safety Research Integration

This thesis focuses on the development and utilization of a virtual reality bicycle simulator for the purposes of traffic safety research. The bicycle simulator is developed using a virtual reality head mounted display (HMD) and commercially available hardware and software in the Unity framework. An experiment was conducted by exposing 24 participants to select scenarios in a virtual environment that were constructed to imitate a real-world location in Lund, Sweden. Observing the effects in term of immersion and cybersickness in relation to development. Recordings from drones were used to capture real life traffic from the location that were tracked and implemented into Unity for increased realism. The participants answered questionnaires incorporating VRSQ: Virtual reality sickness questionnaire and SPES: The spatial presence experience scale. The results indicate that the induced cybersickness is similar to, but slightly lower than that of average mean simulator sickness questionnaire (SSQ) results. SPES showed generally positive results, average answer being 3.6 on a scale from 1-5.