Visual Analytics for Knowledge Laboratory, Department of Software, Sejong University, Seoul 143-747, Korea.
Digital Image Processing Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Islamia College University Peshawar, Peshawar 25000, Pakistan.
Sensors (Basel). 2021 May 25;21(11):3661. doi: 10.3390/s21113661.
Virtual reality (VR) has been widely used as a tool to assist people by letting them learn and simulate situations that are too dangerous and risky to practice in real life, and one of these is road safety training for children. Traditional video- and presentation-based road safety training has average output results as it lacks physical practice and the involvement of children during training, without any practical testing examination to check the learned abilities of a child before their exposure to real-world environments. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a 3D realistic open-ended VR and Kinect sensor-based training setup using the Unity game engine, wherein children are educated and involved in road safety exercises. The proposed system applies the concepts of VR in a game-like setting to let the children learn about traffic rules and practice them in their homes without any risk of being exposed to the outside environment. Thus, with our interactive and immersive training environment, we aim to minimize road accidents involving children and contribute to the generic domain of healthcare. Furthermore, the proposed framework evaluates the overall performance of the students in a virtual environment (VE) to develop their road-awareness skills. To ensure safety, the proposed system has an extra examination layer for children's abilities evaluation, whereby a child is considered fit for real-world practice in cases where they fulfil certain criteria by achieving set scores. To show the robustness and stability of the proposed system, we conduct four types of subjective activities by involving a group of ten students with average grades in their classes. The experimental results show the positive effect of the proposed system in improving the road crossing behavior of the children.
虚拟现实（VR）已被广泛用作一种工具，让人们学习和模拟在现实生活中过于危险和高风险而无法实践的情况，其中之一就是儿童道路安全培训。传统的基于视频和演示的道路安全培训效果平均，因为它缺乏物理实践和儿童在培训过程中的参与，并且没有任何实际的测试考试来检查儿童在接触真实世界环境之前所学的能力。因此，在本文中，我们提出了一种基于 3D 现实开放式 VR 和 Kinect 传感器的培训设置，使用 Unity 游戏引擎，让儿童接受道路安全练习。该系统将 VR 的概念应用于游戏环境中，让孩子们了解交通规则，并在家里练习，而无需承担暴露于外部环境的风险。因此，通过我们的互动和沉浸式培训环境，我们旨在最大限度地减少涉及儿童的道路事故，并为一般的医疗保健领域做出贡献。此外，该框架评估学生在虚拟环境（VE）中的整体表现，以培养他们的道路意识技能。为了确保安全，该系统具有额外的考试层，用于评估儿童的能力，只有在满足某些标准并达到设定分数的情况下，儿童才被认为适合在现实世界中进行实践。为了展示所提出系统的稳健性和稳定性，我们通过涉及一组平均成绩在班级中处于中游的十位学生进行了四种类型的主观活动。实验结果表明，该系统在改善儿童过马路行为方面具有积极的效果。
