The Application of Immersive Virtual Reality for Children’s Road Education: Validation of a Pedestrian Crossing Scenario

Human beings face the matter of transportation and mobility from their early childhood, as vulnerable non-motorized users; besides, road injuries represent one of the leading causes of death for children. This work investigated the possibility of using virtual reality (VR) for educational purposes for road safety. Specifically, through the observation of children’s behavior, a preliminary validation of an immersive virtual reality environment related to a pedestrian crossing scenario (signal and no signal-controlled), a critical component in road safety, was performed. An experiment was carried out, involving 46 middle school students aged between 11 and 13 years. Participants, wearing the headset, crossed the road in a virtual environment designed and implemented with Unity® software. The scenario consisted of training and trial sessions both one-way and two ways, with and without traffic signal. The goal of this preliminary work was to validate the pedestrian crossing scenario in order to use VR as a tool for Road Education. The results of this first analysis are promising: user’s behavior in the experiment was rather consistent with that in the real world. 31 participants waited for the green light to cross, and 11 crossed with the red light matching what the participants declared in a previous survey. Besides, the analysis indicated that the average crossing speed recorded during the experiment was consistent with the one reported in the literature