nuReality: A VR environment for research of pedestrian and autonomous vehicle interactions

TL;DR

nuReality is an immersive VR environment designed to study how autonomous vehicles communicate their intent to pedestrians at urban intersections, enabling safe testing of vehicle behaviors and pedestrian responses.

Contribution

This work introduces a novel, detailed VR environment with multiple vehicle scenarios and open-source resources for studying AV-pedestrian interactions.

Findings

Provides a realistic VR platform for AV-pedestrian interaction research

Includes 10 unique vehicle behavior scenarios

Open-source files support academic research

Abstract

We present nuReality, a virtual reality 'VR' environment designed to test the efficacy of vehicular behaviors to communicate intent during interactions between autonomous vehicles 'AVs' and pedestrians at urban intersections. In this project we focus on expressive behaviors as a means for pedestrians to readily recognize the underlying intent of the AV's movements. VR is an ideal tool to use to test these situations as it can be immersive and place subjects into these potentially dangerous scenarios without risk. nuReality provides a novel and immersive virtual reality environment that includes numerous visual details (road and building texturing, parked cars, swaying tree limbs) as well as auditory details (birds chirping, cars honking in the distance, people talking). In these files we present the nuReality environment, its 10 unique vehicle behavior scenarios, and the Unreal Engine and Autodesk Maya source files for each scenario. The files are publicly released as open source at www.nuReality.org, to support the academic community studying the critical AV-pedestrian interaction.