Development of Design Support System of a Lane for Cyclists and Pedestrians

Abstract

Against the background of increasing a number of accident in the lanes for cyclists and pedestrians, the authors assumed that these lanes have never been designed from the view point of psychological state of pedestrians. Hence, this paper proposes a design support system that reduces the psychological stress of pedestrians. The major features of our simulator are i) a virtual lane is constructed in a head-mounted display by using a free game engine, Unity, ii) the design conditions of the lane are optimized to reduce the psychological stress of pedestrians. This study firstly constructs the virtual pedestrian model by using multi-agent system, in which the behavior standards of each agent is modeled with obeying the idea of personal space. The psychological stress is estimated by measuring Normalized Pulse Volume (NPV). In this paper, we achieved to replace the components of the virtual city model originally provided by Zenrin Inc. to more realistic components we have developed in this study.