Safechild: An intelligent virtual reality environment for training pedestrian safety skills

Abstract

Training children safe behavior in traffic situations is both important and challenging. One of the problems is children’s limited perceptual-motor abilities and associated difficulties with important cognitive skills required to be safe pedestrians. Existing traffic education programs focus more on theoretical knowledge, while training practical skills in the real world is dangerous, expensive and hard to organize. This paper presents a promising alternative – an intelligent virtual reality training environment that allows children to practice their pedestrian skills. It describes the interface and architecture of the system, as well as the skill model of the pedestrian safety domain. The results of the conducted pilot study show that children of the target age group rarely have problems with applying (and acquiring) “basic” pedestrian skills in the developed virtual environment. However, when applying and learning “advanced” skills, they require additional support.