An Immersive Virtual Peer for Studying Social Influences on Child Cyclists' Road-Crossing Behavior

—The goal of our work is to develop a programmatically controlled peer to bicycle with a human subject for the purpose of studying how social interactions influence road-crossing behavior. The peer is controlled through a combination of reactive controllers that determine the gross motion of the virtual bicycle, action-based controllers that animate the virtual bicyclist and generate verbal behaviors, and a keyboard interface that allows an experimenter to initiate the virtual bicyclist’s actions during the course of an experiment. The virtual bicyclist’s repertoire of behaviors includes road following, riding alongside the human rider, stopping at intersections, and crossing intersections through specified gaps in traffic. The virtual cyclist engages the human subject through gaze, gesture, and verbal interactions. We describe the structure of the behavior code and report the results of a study examining how 10and 12-year-old children interact with a peer cyclist that makes eith...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: TVCG
• Authors: Sabarish Babu, Timofey Grechkin, Benjamin Chihak, Christine Ziemer, Joseph K. Kearney, James F. Cremer, Jodie M. Plumert
• Keywords: Behavior, TVCG 2011, Virtual, Virtual Bicyclist