GrokWalks: A Portable Virtual Reality Platform to Facilitate Studying Driver-Pedestrian Interactions

Driving simulators are vital for human-centered automotive research, offering safe, replicable environments for studying human interaction with transportation technology interfaces and behaviors. However, traditional driving simulators are not well-suited to studying traffic interactions with various degrees of freedom in a way that allows for the capture of nuances in implicit and explicit interactions, e.g. gestures, body language, and movement. We developed a multi-participant virtual reality (VR) driving simulation platform to study these interactions. This portable system supports cross-cultural experiments by modeling diverse scenarios, generating analyzable data, and capturing human behaviors in traffic. Our interactive demo allows participants to experience roles as drivers or pedestrians in a shared virtual environment, with the goal of providing a hands-on experience with this open-source VR simulator and demonstrating its affordability and scalability for traffic interaction studies to researchers and practitioners.