A virtual reality experiment to study pedestrian perception of future street scenarios
Abstract
The current allocation of street space is based on expected vehicular peak-hour flows. Flexible and adaptive use of this space can respond to changing needs. To evaluate the acceptability of flexible street layouts, several urban environments were designed and implemented in virtual reality. Participants explored these designs in immersive virtual reality in a 2 × 3 mixed factorial experiment, in which we analysed self-reported, behavioural and physiological responses from participants. Distinct communication strategies were varied between subjects. Participants' responses reveal a preference for familiar solutions. Unconventional street layouts are less preferred, perceived as unsafe and cause a measurably greater stress response. Furthermore, information provision focusing on comparisons lead participants to focus primarily on the drawbacks, instead of the advantages of novel scenarios. When being able to freely express thoughts and opinions, participants are focused more on the impact of space design on behaviour rather than the objective physical features themselves. Especially, this last finding suggests that it is vital to develop new street scenarios in an inclusive and democratic way: the success of innovating urban spaces depends on how well the vast diversity of citizens' needs is considered and met.
Copyright and License
© The Author(s) 2024. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Acknowledgement
JASV, CIH, SM, MM, MS and DH acknowledge support through the project “CoCi: Co-Evolving City Life”, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 833168. The authors would like to express their gratitude to several individuals who provided valuable assistance and support during this study. We thank Stefan Wehrli and Manuel Widmer from the Decision Science Laboratory (DeSciL) at ETH Zürich for their expert feedback on experimental methods, as well as for their invaluable assistance in carrying out the experiments. We are also grateful to Michal Gath Morad for providing insightful comments during a productive Zoom call. Additionally, we extend our thanks to Fabian Schläfli for his thoughtful feedback on the project during a helpful Zoom call. Their contributions were instrumental in the successful completion of this research, and we deeply appreciate their time, effort, and expertise contributed.
Funding
Open access funding provided by Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
Contributions
J.A.S.V. proposed and designed the three scenarios and co-designed the virtual traffic situations. He supervised the students, performed the data processing and statistical analysis, and contributed to drafting, writing and reviewing the manuscript, and the figures. C.I.H. worked out the details of the treatment variations and supervised the students. She co-developed ideas for scenarios and situations, drafted the hypotheses, and introduced the idea of using sensors to monitor physiological data. Furthermore, she specified procedural details with the Decision Science Laboratory (DeSciL) and acquired ethics approval. She also contributed to writing the manuscript, the statistical analysis, and particularly the stability point analysis. S.M. contributed technical details on responsive street technology and searched for appropriate sensors as well as papers describing a connection between sensor data and behaviour. He performed heart rate data analysis and also contributed to writing the manuscript. M.S. and M.M. developed the virtual reality (VR) setting and contributed to preprocessing the data and writing the manuscript. D.H. proposed to study adaptive infrastructures and flexible uses of streets, acquired funding, engaged the VR developers, provided feedback and ideas, and contributed to the manuscript. M.E. read the paper and provided feedback on experimental details. He also contributed a section on pedestrian–vehicle interaction. All authors critically reviewed and edited the manuscript and approved the final version for submission.
Data Availability
To ensure the transparency and reproducibility of our research, we will make raw and processed data, analysis scripts and code publicly available after acceptance via an open-access GitHub repository. The working repository, https://github.com/ethz-coss/VR_future_streets, can be accessed upon invitation.
Conflict of Interest
The authors declare no competing interests.
Files
s41598-024-55073-x.pdf
Additional details
Identifiers
- PMCID
- PMC10894882
Funding
- European Research Council
- 833168
- ETH Zurich