skip to main content
article

Using virtual environments to assess time-to-contact judgments from pedestrian viewpoints

Published: 01 November 2007 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes the use of desktop and immersive virtual environments to study judgments that pedestrians make when deciding to cross a street. In particular, we assess the ability of people to discriminate and estimate time-to-contact (TTC) for approaching vehicles under a variety of conditions. Four experiments observing TTC judgments under various conditions are described. We examine the effect of type of vehicle, viewpoint, presentation mode, and TTC value on TTC judgments. We find no significant effect of type of vehicle or of viewpoint, extending prior work to cover all views typically encountered by pedestrians. Discrimination of short values for TTC judgments is generally consistent with the literature, but performance degrades significantly for long TTC values. Finally, we find no significant difference between judgments made in a desktop environment versus a head-mounted display, indicating that tracking the approaching vehicle with one's head does not aid discrimination. In general, people appear to use strategies similar to those that pedestrians use to make real-world, street-crossing decisions.

References

[1]
Ashmead, D. H., Guth, D., Wall, R. S., Long, R. G., and Ponchillia, P. E. 2005. Street crossing by sighted and blind pedestrians at a modern roundabout. J. Trans. Eng. 131, 812--821.
[2]
Benguigui, N., Ripoll, H., and Broderick, M. P. 2003. Time-to-contact estimation of accelerated stimuli is based on first-order information. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 29, 1083--1101.
[3]
Bootsma, R. J. and Craig, C. M. 2002. Global and local contributions to the optical specification of time to contact: Observer sensitivity to composite tau. Perception 31, 901--924.
[4]
Caird, J. K. and Hancock, P. A. 1994. The perception of arrival time for different oncoming vehicles at an intersection. Ecological Psychology 6, 83--109.
[5]
Caljouw, S. R., van der Kamp, J., and Savelsbergh, G. J. P. 2004. Catching optical information for the regulation of timing. Exp. Brain. Res. 155, 427--438.
[6]
Cavallo, V. and Laurent, M. 1988. Visual information and skill level in time-to-collision estimation. Perception 17, 623--632.
[7]
DeLucia, P. R. and Novak, J. B. 1997. Judgments of relative time-to-contact of more than two approaching objects: Toward a method. Percept. Psychophys. 59, 913--928.
[8]
Gray, R. and Regan, D. 1999. Do monocular time-to-collision estimates necessarily involve perceived distance? Perception 28, 1257--1264.
[9]
Guth, D., Ashmead, D., Long, R., Wall, R., and Ponchillia, P. 2005. Blind and sighted pedestrians' judgments of gaps in traffic at roundabouts. Human Factors 47, 314--331.
[10]
Heuer, H. 1993. Estimates of time to contact based on changing size and changing target vergence. Perception 22, 549--563.
[11]
Iowa Department of Transportation. 2005. Standard specifications with gs-01008 revisions.
[12]
Kiefer, R., Flannagan, C., and Jerome, C. 2006. Time-to-collision judgments under realistic driving conditions. Human Factors 48, 334--345.
[13]
Kim, N. and Grocki, J. 2006. Multiple sources of information and time-to-contact judgments. Vis. Res. 46, 1946--1958.
[14]
Lee, D. N. 1976. A theory of visual control of braking based on information about time-to-collision. Perception 5, 437--459.
[15]
Manser, M. P. and Hancock, P. A. 1996. Influence of approach angle on estimates of time-to-contact. Ecological Psychology 8, 71--99.
[16]
McLeod, R. W. and Ross, H. E. 1983. Optic-flow and cognitive factors in time-to-collision estimates. Perception 12, 417--423.
[17]
National Center for Statistics and Analysis. 2005. Traffic safety facts: 2005 data.
[18]
Pitt, R., Guyer, B., Hsieh, C. C., and Malek, M. 1990. The severity of pedestrian injuries in children: An analysis of the pedestrian injury causation study. Accid. Anal. Prev. 22, 549--559.
[19]
Plumert, J. M., Kearney, J. K., and Cremer, J. F. 2004. Children's perception of gap affordances: Bicylcing across traffic-filled intersections in an immersive virtual environment. Child Develop. 75, 1243--1253.
[20]
Regan, D. and Hamstra, S. J. 1993. Dissociation of discrimination thresholds for time to contact and for rate of angular expansion. Vision Res. 33, 447--462.
[21]
Schiff, W. and Detwiler, M. L. 1979. Information used in judging impending collision. Perception 8, 647--658.
[22]
Schiff, W. and Oldak, R. 1990. Accuracy of judging time to arrival: Effects of modality, trajectory, and gender. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 16, 303--316.
[23]
Servos, P. and Goodale, M. A. 1998. Monocular and binocular control of human interceptive movements. Exp. Brain. Res. 119, 92--102.
[24]
Seward, A. E., Ashmead, D. H., and Bodenheimer, B. 2006. Discrimination and estimation of time-to-contact for approaching traffic using a desktop environment. In APGV 2006: Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization. 29--32.
[25]
Sidaway, B., Fairweather, M., Sekiya, H., and McNitt-Gray, J. 1996. Time-to-collision estimation in a simulated driving task. Human Factors 38, 101--113.
[26]
Smeets, J. B. J., Brenner, E., Trebuchet, S., and Mestre, D. R. 1996. Is judging time-to-contact based on ‘tau’? Perception 25, 583--590.
[27]
Todd, J. T. 1981. Visual information about moving objects. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 7, 795--810.
[28]
Tresilian, J. R. 1994. Apprximate information sources and perceptual variables in interceptive timing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 20, 1 (Feb.), 154--173.
[29]
Tresilian, J. R. 1995. Perceptual and cognitive processes in time-to-contact estimation: Analysis of prediction-motion and relative judgment tasks. Perception and Psychophysics 57, 231--245.
[30]
von Hofsten, C. and Lee, D. N. 1985. Dialogue on perception and action. In Persistence and change, W. H. Warren and R. E. Shaw, Eds. Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ. 231--242.
[31]
von Hofsten, C., Rosengren, K., Pick, H. L., and Neely, G. 1992. The role of binocular information in ball catching. J. Mot. Behav. 24, 328--338.
[32]
Wetherill, C. B. and Levitt, H. 1965. Sequential estimation of points on a psychometric function. British J. Math. Stat. Psychol. 18, 1--10.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Can a Virtual Reality Training Scenario Elicit Similar Stress Response as a Realistic Scenario-Based Training Scenario?Police Quarterly10.1177/1098611123118272927:1(109-129)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2023
  • (2021)Pedestrian time-to-arrival judgment of vehicles in naturalistic traffic scenes2021 6th International Conference on Transportation Information and Safety (ICTIS)10.1109/ICTIS54573.2021.9798497(1342-1347)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2021
  • (2021)The effect of “yield to pedestrians” policy enforcement on pedestrian street crossing behavior: A 3-year case study in Xi’an, ChinaTravel Behaviour and Society10.1016/j.tbs.2021.04.00124(172-180)Online publication date: Jul-2021
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Using virtual environments to assess time-to-contact judgments from pedestrian viewpoints

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Applied Perception
    ACM Transactions on Applied Perception  Volume 4, Issue 3
    November 2007
    109 pages
    ISSN:1544-3558
    EISSN:1544-3965
    DOI:10.1145/1278387
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 01 November 2007
    Published in TAP Volume 4, Issue 3

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. Virtual reality (VR)
    2. time-to-contact (TTC)

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)14
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
    Reflects downloads up to 02 Mar 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Can a Virtual Reality Training Scenario Elicit Similar Stress Response as a Realistic Scenario-Based Training Scenario?Police Quarterly10.1177/1098611123118272927:1(109-129)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2023
    • (2021)Pedestrian time-to-arrival judgment of vehicles in naturalistic traffic scenes2021 6th International Conference on Transportation Information and Safety (ICTIS)10.1109/ICTIS54573.2021.9798497(1342-1347)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2021
    • (2021)The effect of “yield to pedestrians” policy enforcement on pedestrian street crossing behavior: A 3-year case study in Xi’an, ChinaTravel Behaviour and Society10.1016/j.tbs.2021.04.00124(172-180)Online publication date: Jul-2021
    • (2020)Teacher Perceptions of Equity in High School Computer Science ClassroomsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/341063320:3(1-27)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2020
    • (2019)Özel Eğitimde Sanal Gerçeklik UygulamalarıAnkara Üniversitesi Eğitim Bilimleri Fakültesi Özel Eğitim Dergisi10.21565/ozelegitimdergisi.44832220:2(395-420)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2019
    • (2019)Impending Collision Judgment from an Egocentric Perspective in Real and Virtual Environments: A ReviewPerception10.1177/030100661986189248:9(769-795)Online publication date: 30-Jul-2019
    • (2019)Evaluating Local Disaster Recovery StrategiesACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3305218.330524146:2(62-66)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2019
    • (2019)REACT to Cyber-Physical Attacks on Power grids (Extended Abstract)ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3305218.330523846:2(50-51)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2019
    • (2019)A Markov Decision Process Approach to Analyze Discount & Reputation Trade-offs in E-commerce SystemsACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/3305218.330522146:2(3-5)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2019
    • (2018)Using Virtual Reality to Assess the Street Crossing Behavior of Pedestrians With Simulated Macular Degeneration at a RoundaboutFrontiers in ICT10.3389/fict.2018.000275Online publication date: 16-Oct-2018
    • Show More Cited By

    View Options

    Login options

    Full Access

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media