A Low Cost Approach to Pediatric Pedestrian Safety in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) technology has shown tremendous advancements in recent times. Several VR tools have been developed which depict advanced virtual environments that allow user interaction and manipulation. These tools have found many applications in training and learning. A VR tool is proposed in this paper to study the behavior of children when they are faced with real-world situations of road safety. The driver for this study is the fact that pedestrian injuries are a major cause of death among children ages 5-9 in the United States. The proposed VR tool includes VR software and hardware to simulate a virtual environment faced by a typical pedestrian while crossing the street(s). The VR tool represents a street with simulated traffic patterns and an avatar to represent the pedestrian. It is aimed at training children on safely crossing the roads in order to avoid accidents. The virtual environment will allow users to engage in (and investigators to measure)street-crossing behavior in a controlled environment.