Creating Virtual Reality Scenarios for Pedestrian Experiments Focusing on Social Interactions

Designing and running real world pedestrian experiments can be complex, costly, and it can even have ethical implications. Virtual Reality can represent an alternative enabling the execution of experiments in a virtual environments, with synthetic humans (i.e. agents) interacting with human subjects. To achieve a high degree of realism, such virtual humans should behave realistically from many points of view: in this paper, we focus on how they move inside the environment. We propose the design, and first prototype, of a new tool based on Unity, simplifying the setup of realistic scenarios for experiments in VR with humans. In particular, this tool lets the modeler integrate external pathfinding models so as to achieve realistic and believable scenarios for experiments with human subjects.