Fig 1.
Layout of a cross street intersection and traffics.
The traveler is standing at the street corner indicated by the blue circle and intends to cross the perpendicular street in the direction indicated by the blue arrow. Red and green arrows are perpendicular and parallel traffic, respectively. The near lane parallel traffic (thick green arrow, NLPT) comes from behind, over his left shoulder. Right-turn cars (magenta dashed arrow) may share the near lane.
Fig 2.
The visual and auditory display components of the VR simulation used in the research.
Fig 3.
A virtual street intersection viewed from the location of a participant.
Fig 4.
Events and time intervals used to evaluate safety of street crossing timing.
Four possible combinations of the participant’s GO call (cyan circles), the onset of the WALK sign (the green circle) and the time when a near lane parallel traffic surge being confirmed (magenta circles) are shown in a WALK phase delineated by the onset of the WALK sign (WALK On) and the onset of the DON’T WALK sign (DON’T WALK On). (A-D) illustrate the four possible time sequences of the WALK On, Surge Confirmed and GO events.
Table 1.
Sample pre- and post-training real street evaluation data sheets.
Table 2.
Description of the 12 low vision participants.
Fig 5.
Pre- and Post-training safety categorization distributions for the virtual street and real street training groups.
(A) Proportion of the GO calls falling into the InRed, BeforeSurge, SafeLow and SafeHigh categories obtained from the pre- (red bars) and post-training (green bars) evaluations for the virtual street training (VST) group. (B) Same distribution plots for the real street training (RST) group.
Fig 6.
Pre- and post-training safety scores of the virtual street training (VST) and real street training (RST) groups.