The validation of pedestrian trajectories during turning and obstacle avoidance in virtual environments

Virtual Reality (VR) enables to study pedestrian evacuation behavior in emergencies. Yet, studies are lacking in assessing the similarity of pedestrian behaviors like avoiding and turning in virtual and real environments. In this work, we test pedestrians' avoiding and turning behavior in virtual environments from the first-person and third-person perspectives and compare the results in real environments based on the pedestrian trajectories. It is shown that the differences between the real and virtual environments in many indicators were significant in statistics, and the trajectories of participants from the third-person perspective in the virtual environment were much more similar to those from the real environment under our experimental settings. Meanwhile, most participants (22 out of 23) think that their avoiding and turning behaviors in the virtual environment from the third-person perspective were more in line with those in the real environment. The study shows that the third-person perspective is better than the first-person perspective in terms of trajectory indicators and controlling experience. The study could be used as a basis in the future for the perspective choosing while carrying out similar virtual experiments, so as to ensure the similarity of pedestrian trajectories in virtual and real environments.