Development of a Virtual Reality Traffic Simulation to Analyze Road User Behavior

Traffic safety researchers from various disciplines, including transportation, psychology, education, and health, frequently use virtual reality (VR) traffic simulations in game engines (e.g., Unity) to study road user behavior. A critical limitation of many such studies is simplified traffic simulation, including simplified vehicle-to-vehicle interactions in which vehicles do not respond realistically to each other. This shortcoming may limit the accuracy and practical relevance of the findings for real-world traffic safety improvements. Traffic simulation software such as Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) provides comprehensive traffic simulation based on car-following and lane-changing models, and additional components such as posted speed limit compliance, turning movement behaviors, right-of-way rules, and intersection controls. In this study, we developed a framework for a VR traffic simulation in which a VR user can interact with traffic vehicles generated by SUMO micro-simulation. We developed a process for creating a road network, and a process for integrating SUMO with Unity. We also generated a performance function to evaluate the integration performance. The results showed that the integration successfully generated a realistic traffic simulation.