A bicycle simulator for experiencing microscopic traffic flow simulation in urban environments

Urban environments often imply complex transportation infrastructures with manifold different traffic participant using various modes of transport. These traffic participants interact with each other in different ways, often in specific patterns of communication. One option for understanding these interactions may come from microscopic traffic flow simulations. Simulated traffic on modelled urban transportation infrastructures may deliver insights on general traffic-related problems or show specific locations of high risk of accidents or of low traffic quality. Besides having a general view on microscopic traffic flow simulation results, we propose one option for experiencing these simulations from a first-person perspective visualization as one interacting traffic participant on a non-moving physical bicycle. We introduce a procedure for implementing a bicycle simulator for testing various scenarios in three-dimensional environments. By including individual realtime bicycle movements of test subjects into ongoing traffic simulations, we are able to derive individual behavioral strategies to cope with the modelled transportation infrastructure and with simulated vehicle drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians from the point of view of an urban bicyclist. We aim to introduce a novel technique for (1) analyzing present problems of traffic and built infrastructural elements, and, (2) inspecting planned scenarios with variations in traffic compositions (participants and modes) and built infrastructure (inclusion of new design elements). One first test scenario is implemented for gaining first insights on the usefulness of the presented device.