Democratizing Mobilities Design Tools Using Virtual Reality: Aiding Designers Simulate Crowd Flow on Rejsekort Validator Placement in Copenhagen's Nørreport Metro Station

Eriksen, Stefan Nordborg ; Tovar Siso, Ivan David ; Jensen, Kasper Amstrup

4. term

Medialogy, Master

2022

2022-05-24

76 pages

The term mobilities design is broadly used throughout the design industry as a way of streamlining the flow of people traversing through urban areas. In this digital age, many of the tools used in the workflow of urban designers, to visualize the potential effects of different design choices are already well established, with tools such as Legion or PTV Viswalk. However, as the concept of virtual reality is still gaining popularity and is finding its way into many different industries, an opportunity was seen in trying to incorporate the many qualities of virtual reality into the design process of urban designers. Virtual reality allows for a real-life perspective which cannot be gained on a normal 2D monitor. Furthermore, having the agents react to changes in real-time, removes the chore of having to restart the simulation every time a change in the setup of the simulation is made. Instead, the effects of changes to the virtual environment are immediately shown inside the simulation. This project takes its point of origin in how virtual reality can support designers in visualizing the flow of a crowd traversing through an urban area. As a specific use-case, a collaboration was formed with Metroselskabet in Copenhagen, Denmark, with the specific task of visualizing the effect from rearranging the validators at Nørreport metro station. This project consists of three main elements which make up the final prototype. First is crowd simulation, utilizing Unity’s NavMesh system for pathfinding, and behavior trees for scripting the agent behavior. Secondly, interaction is used in order to allow users to navigate and interact in the prototype. Finally, a virtual environment is created to bind it all together. The prototype was evaluated using an expert heuristic evaluation along with Cybersickness and presence questionnaires. The participants in this evaluation, were four experts from Metroselskabet and one virtual reality expert from Aalborg University. The results show that although some interactive problems remain to be corrected, the prototype can be considered a sufficient and valid tool for performing design tasks in the given virtual environment. During the evaluation, some experts at Metroselskabet found agents in the environment to be disruptive and distracting, and noted discomfort from being surrounded by virtual crowds. They also reported high levels of induced Cybersickness when evaluating the prototype with steering locomotion, but were very comfortable with teleportation. They also felt the fidelity of the graphical elements of virtual environment were sufficiently representative of its counterpart in the real world.

Interaction ; Simulation ; Behaviour Trees ; Navigation ; Multi-agent simulation ; Virtual Reality ; Virtual Environment ; Computer Graphics ; Real-time simulations ; Crowd flow ; Mobilities Design

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