Future Mobility Solutions: A Use Case for Understanding How VR Influences User Perception

Virtual Reality (VR) affords the opportunity to experience things that could be cost-prohibitive, dangerous, or even impossible in real life. One of these impossibilities is virtual time traveling, a way to be fully immersed in a simulation of the past or future. Our team used user-centered design methodologies and expert guidance to create a VR scenario exploring what the future of urban transportation could look like. Focusing on a sharing economy (e.g. mobility as a service), the experience uses existing technologies as well as science-based theoretical concepts to create an immersive, interactive simulation of how daily transit habits could evolve. A subsequent user study explored how VR can influence someone’s attitudes and perceptions towards these sorts of mobility concepts and technologies. Our results show that VR is an effective way to quickly and intuitively explain complex concepts and may also play a role in broadening user perspectives.