Project Westdrive: Unity City With Self-Driving Cars and Pedestrians for Virtual Reality Studies
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https://osnadocs.ub.uni-osnabrueck.de/handle/urn:nbn:de:gbv:700-202105114486
https://osnadocs.ub.uni-osnabrueck.de/handle/urn:nbn:de:gbv:700-202105114486
Title: | Project Westdrive: Unity City With Self-Driving Cars and Pedestrians for Virtual Reality Studies |
Authors: | Nezami, Farbod N. Wächter, Maximilian A. Pipa, Gordon König, Peter |
ORCID of the author: | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1599-6958 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3654-5267 |
Abstract: | Virtual environments will deeply alter the way we conduct scientific studies on human behavior. Possible applications range from spatial navigation over addressing moral dilemmas in a more natural manner to therapeutic applications for affective disorders. The decisive factor for this broad range of applications is that virtual reality (VR) is able to combine a well-controlled experimental environment together with the ecological validity of the immersion of test subjects. Until now, however, programming such an environment in Unity® requires profound knowledge of C# programming, 3D design, and computer graphics. In order to give interested research groups access to a realistic VR environment which can easily adapt to the varying needs of experiments, we developed a large, open source, scriptable, and modular VR city. It covers an area of 230 hectare, up to 150 self-driving vehicles and 655 active and passive pedestrians and thousands of nature assets to make it both highly dynamic and realistic. Furthermore, the repository presented here contains a stand-alone City AI toolkit for creating avatars and customizing cars. Finally, the package contains code to easily set up VR studies. All main functions are integrated into the graphical user interface of the Unity® Editor to ease the use of the embedded functionalities. In summary, the project named Westdrive is developed to enable research groups to access a state-of-the-art VR environment that is easily adapted to specific needs and allows focus on the respective research question. |
Citations: | Nezami FN, Wächter MA, Pipa G and König P (2020) Project Westdrive: Unity City With Self-Driving Cars and Pedestrians for Virtual Reality Studies. Front. ICT 7:1. |
URL: | https://osnadocs.ub.uni-osnabrueck.de/handle/urn:nbn:de:gbv:700-202105114486 |
Subject Keywords: | VR research; virtual environment; Code: C#; VR code repository; VR foundation; open source VR |
Issue Date: | 31-Jan-2020 |
License name: | Attribution 4.0 International |
License url: | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Type of publication: | Einzelbeitrag in einer wissenschaftlichen Zeitschrift [article] |
Appears in Collections: | FB08 - Hochschulschriften Open-Access-Publikationsfonds |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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fict_Nezami_etal_2020.pdf | 1,71 MB | Adobe PDF | fict_Nezami_etal_2020.pdf View/Open |
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