Insights into Interaction - Effects of Human-Human Interaction in Pedestrian Crossing Situations using a linked Simulator Environment

The classical and common approach of driving simulation as a tool in traffic research is usually limited to one driving simulator. The behavior of the driver in specific traffic situations is of interest while driving through programmed scenarios, encountering the situations addressing the research questions and reacting on the more or less sufficient programmed other road users. Especially the latter is, due to programming skills and limitations of the used software frameworks, the bottleneck when it comes to the crucial aspect of social interaction. This mutual behavior adaption is a vivid, complex, short-timed and multi-directional process between road users and is of even higher interest when focusing on urban traffic. In this paper, an approach is presented which addresses the aspect of social interaction in driving simulation in case of pedestrian crossing situations. A multi simulator setting is used to bring both participants in the same virtual environment and perform the given driving respectively walking task while encountering each other for example at a zebra crossing or in an occlusion situation. Driving data like time-to-arrival, braking pressure and average speed in these situations reveal the effects of the human-human interaction in contrast to human-bot interaction.