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Book Chapter

Driving Simulator for Road Safety Design: A Comparison Between Virtual Reality Tests and In-Field Tests

  • Monica Meocci
  • Alessandro Terrosi
  • Andrea Paliotto
  • Francesca La Torre Bellardoni
  • Irene Infante

Virtual reality simulations conducted by driving simulators represent a methodology to assess both the quality of road design and road safety in a safe, controlled, and replicable environment. Nowadays, there are numerous studies that use driving simulators to analyze the driver's response when specific road safety treatments are planned before these are implemented. This approach allows the road designer/scientist to estimate the potential safety effectiveness of the countermeasure/design configuration considered. However, although virtual reality simulations are potentially extremely useful in the evaluation of road configuration design and treatments effectiveness, they also have cons. The two most important are the limitations in the reproducibility of the real world environment and the difference in drivers’ behavior due to the awareness that they are conducting a test. In this context, our research compared the data collected during virtual reality experiments with those collected in the field with an instrumented vehicle, after a few years from the implementation of the specific safety measure on a real road. Statistical analyses were conducted to compare the results of the two experiments to demonstrate the reliability of the virtual simulations and to identify the limitations

  • Keywords:
  • driving simulator,
  • road safety,
  • virtual reality,
  • road safety treatments,
  • road safety measures effectiveness,
  • in-field test,
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Monica Meocci

University of Florence, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0003-0878-7381

Alessandro Terrosi

University of Florence, Italy

Andrea Paliotto

University of Florence, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0002-3153-8167

Francesca La Torre Bellardoni

University of Florence, Italy - ORCID: 0000-0001-7755-8342

Irene Infante

University of Florence, Italy

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  • Publication Year: 2023
  • Pages: 206-218

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  • Publication Year: 2023

Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Driving Simulator for Road Safety Design: A Comparison Between Virtual Reality Tests and In-Field Tests

Authors

Monica Meocci, Alessandro Terrosi, Andrea Paliotto, Francesca La Torre Bellardoni, Irene Infante

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0289-3.20

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2023

Copyright Information

© 2023 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY-NC 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

CONVR 2023 - Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality

Book Subtitle

Managing the Digital Transformation of Construction Industry

Editors

Pietro Capone, Vito Getuli, Farzad Pour Rahimian, Nashwan Dawood, Alessandro Bruttini, Tommaso Sorbi

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2023

Copyright Information

© 2023 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY-NC 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-0289-3

eISBN (pdf)

979-12-215-0289-3

eISBN (xml)

979-12-215-0257-2

Series Title

Proceedings e report

Series ISSN

2704-601X

Series E-ISSN

2704-5846

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