Hands free steering in a virtual world for the evaluation of guidance systems in pedestrian infrastructures: design and validation

This paper presents the development and validation of hands free steering in a cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE) designed to make the reactions of pedestrians to guidance information measureable. The navigation uses the Microsoft Kinect to obtain information on the movement of the user. The user walks on the place to move forward in the virtual world and turns her shoulders to invoke rotations in the virtual world in order to make turns. After the implementation of the hands free steering the validity of the model has been explored using a case study involving parallel test groups exposing individuals to wayfinding exercises in the real world and the corresponding virtual world. The results show that the objective distances and times in the real and the virtual worlds as well as perceptions of distances, times and directions do not differ statistically significantly validating the model for steering.