Speed Experience: Assessing the Quality of Vehicle Speed Perception in Virtual Environments

The use of Virtual Reality Environments (VREs) is gaining popularity in various application areas. The combination of a traffic simulation and VRE enables to evaluate whether a newly planned street environment is perceived as safe and pleasant from the pedestrian's perspective. In this context, the quality of speed perception is of major importance. Thus, experiments were conducted to evaluate the quality of vehicle speed perception in a fully immersive VRE. In a speed estimation task, twenty participants reported their speed estimation on passing cars in different scenarios. The participants underestimated actual speed in all scenarios, whereby passing cars with a lower speed of 30 km/h were underestimated more than with 50 and 70 km/h. This contradicts the results of studies in real-world where pedestrians were able to accurately estimate speeds up to 40 km/h and tend to underestimate higher speeds over 40 km/h. Further investigations with additional contexts and scenarios are therefore necessary to find out why speed perception in a VRE is different from speed perception in real-world.