Investigating Effects of Future Path Visualisation on Path Choices During Collision Encounters

Abstract Safe navigation choices made in walkable spaces highly depend on how a traveller perceives and understands the threat from surrounding travellers’ movements. Hence, if a visual medium like an AR headset provides an augmented view where future paths of others are already shown virtually, this could influence the way a person decides to avoid a potential collision. In this work, taking walking conflicts as an example, we first propose different ways of showing the future path in AR and then investigate whether people decide to walk more safety-consciously when seeing AR information. For this, we conducted a web-based user study ( n =27), in which participants sketched a walking path that they preferred when avoiding collisions in different crossing scenes. Each scene in the study contained another person walking and crossing the participant’s expected path, while the prediction of the another person’s future walking path was either not visualised or augmented with a virtual arrow. Participants were then expected to sketch a path to their destination while not colliding with the person in the scene. By applying a sketch transformation pipeline, the participants’ drawings were transformed to trajectories of the preferred walking paths, which where then simulated to estimate the conflict severity using the Post Encroachment Time (PET) metric. The study verified that people choose to adapt their walking paths when seeing the future path information, and also react differently to different types of 3D arrow visualisations that represent the same future path.