Which Methodology? A Proposed Comparison of Studies in Real-Life, Video, and VR

Which Methodology? A Proposed Comparison of Studies in Real-Life, Video, and VR

Research in context of Autonomous Vehicle (AV) and pedestrian interaction includes difficult challenges. For example, AVs are not yet publicly available. Therefore, meaningful research is mainly performed in controlled environments e.g., closed test tracks or laboratory settings. Such studies represent only an approximation of reality. It cannot be assumed that participants behave in the same way as in the real world. The validity of results from such studies might be limited, since consequences of misbehavior (e.g., collisions) do not imply physical damage. We will uncover to what extend pedestrian behaviour differs in context of three discriminative methodological approaches: (1) a real world study, (2) a video-based setting and (3) an investigation in Virtual Reality (VR). The study scenario will focus on pedestrians’ willingness to cross a street with an autonomous vehicle present. We expect to get valuable insights for the research community by uncovering differences in results regarding each study modality.