SafeChild: An Intelligent Virtual Reality Environment for Training Pedestrian Safety Skills
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. Exis
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German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany {yecheng.gu,sergey.sosnovsky,carsten.ullrich}@dfki.de
Abstract. Training children safe behavior in traffic situations is both important and challenging. One of the problems is children’s limited perceptual-motor abil‐ ities and associated difficulties with important cognitive skills required to be safe pedestrians. Existing traffic education programs focus more on theoretical knowl‐ edge, 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 pedes‐ trian 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 envi‐ ronment. However, when applying and learning “advanced” skills, they require additional support. Keywords: Virtual reality · Student modeling · Intelligent tutoring system · Pedestrian safety
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Introduction
Child pedestrians, especially aged 5 to 9, are endangered traffic participants [1]. According to statistics, just in 2013 in Germany, they were involved in over 3.000 traffic accidents [2]. In USA, more than 11.000 of pedestrian injuries in 2011 happened to children under 14 [3], and the numbers worldwide are also alarming [4]. There are many reasons for children to be especially endangered in traffic. They are hard to see, physically fragile, and their perceptual-motor abilities are still limited [4]. Mentally, children not only lack the knowledge about traffic safety, but also have difficulties with the cognitive skills that are required to be safe pedestrians [1, 5]. On the bright side, several studies indicate that children’s behavior on roads can improve significantly through individualized practical street side training [6]. However, a number of requirements must be met for organizing such training. This includes particular weather and traffic conditions as well as sufficient personnel to guide the training and ensure the safety of the children. Yet, even when the © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 G. Conole et al. (Eds.): EC-TEL 2015, LNCS 9307, pp. 141–154, 2015. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-24258-3_11
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requirements can be met, roadside training remains unpredictable and hard to control [5]. Therefore it is very challenging for educational institutions (such as schools and kindergartens) to provide a sufficient amount of practical traffic safety training. One promising way to tackle these problems is to employ Virtual Reality (VR) and conduct training in virtual road environments that are not only realistic and immersive, but also safe and controllable. With the increase in computing and graphical power of home PCs and the recent
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