Did you know:

• Pedestrian road crashes are amongst the most substantial causes of death, injury and long-term disability among children, particularly among those in the age range of 5-to 9 years
• Negotiating traffic requires a variety of cognitive and perceptual skills.  When those skills are not properly developed, pedestrians road-related decisions will probably be inadequate
• Young children are less competent in traffic than adults
• A large proportion of traffic injuries occur while children are walking to or from school
• Elementary-school children cross the road without adults’ accompaniment, especially when coming back from school
• Prohibiting children under the age of 9 from crossing the road alone is not sufficient for reducing their over-involvement in pedestrian crashes

Towards understanding child-pedestrian’s deficits in perceiving hazards when crossing the road

Together with my colleague David Shinar and two graduate students Anat Meir and Hagai Tapiro we are  in the process of developing a platform to study how children at various ages perceive hazards and dangers in the traffic environment. We have developed an experimental platform that mimics a typical Israeli urban environment.

A Dome projection facility

• Integrates the natural visual and motor skills of a person into the environment
• Large enough to have participants immersed within its circumference
• Physical movement can be added to improve simulation fidelity
• Our dome is a 180 degrees projection facility (6.5 meters in diameter with 3-D perception projection system) it is temperature and noise controlled
• A verity of measurement (including eye tracking) and recording systems are available

Musts….

• for such a facility to be useful it must project a typical urban environment that resembles reality with the appropriate level of resolution and level of detail
• A 3-d model database of a typical Israeli urban area was developed (the database was generated by bdesign and is run on the MAK VR-Forces/VR-Vantage platform)
• Typical crossing scenarios are now being designed

So here I am proudly standing in the dome room and here’s Hagai in the control room.