Project leads: Donal McNally, Cath Harvey, David Large, Glyn Lawson

We have created a person-centred, Virtual Reality (VR) experience which enables users to navigate areas of Nottingham as pedestrians. Users can freely move and look around areas of the city whilst wearing a VR headset. This can also be presented as a ‘multi-user’ experience, where 2 or more users wearing headsets can interact like pedestrians would in the real world.

Most of our research uses generic simulated scenarios, which lack familiarity and realism. Using images of real-world Nottingham creates a much more personalised experienced, particularly for local people. This means that we will be able to answer questions specific to Nottingham within our research, which focusses on pedestrian, cyclist and road user safety.

In future work, we will use this VR experience to understand more about human interactions in real-world spaces. We will be able to add objects to the environment and observe how people interact with them. For example, we could test how a novel human-machine interface might provide guidance to help people navigate through the centre of Nottingham. Users could also ‘experience’ what it is like to navigate around the city from another person’s perspective, for example someone who has a visual impairment or someone who uses a wheelchair. These insights would be used to inform the human-centred design of future cities and the technologies which support our interactions within urban spaces.