Virtual Immersive Reality for Stated Preference Travel Behaviour Experiments: A Case Study of Autonomous Vehicles on Urban Roads

TL;DR

This paper introduces Virtual Immersive Reality Environment (VIRE), a highly realistic simulation tool for stated preference experiments, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing pedestrian preferences for autonomous vehicles and infrastructure changes in urban settings.

Contribution

The paper presents VIRE, a novel immersive simulation platform that enhances realism and understanding in preference experiments, especially for autonomous vehicle scenarios.

Findings

VIRE yields more realistic and consistent preference data.

Participants better understand scenarios with VIRE compared to traditional methods.

VIRE improves the reliability of stated preference experiments.

Abstract

Stated preference experiments have been known to suffer from the lack of realism. This issue is particularly visible when the scenario doesn't have a well understood prior reference e.g. in case of the autonomous vehicles related scenarios. We present Virtual Immersive Reality Environment (VIRE) that is capable of developing highly realistic, immersive, and interactive choice scenario. We demonstrate the use of VIRE in the pedestrian preferences related to autonomous vehicles and associated infrastructure changes on urban streets of Montr\'eal. The results are compared with predominantly used approaches i.e. text-only and visual aid. We show that VIRE results in better understanding of the scenario and consistent results.