PhD Thesis Research

PhD Research Research (March 2010 to September 2013)

My PhD research focused on building an online multi-user 3D virtual reality based experimental space for solving real world problems in transportation domain, specifically for sensing human driving behavioral data.

I built a 3D virtual reality based experimental space to empower traffic engineers so that they can study human factor that influence driving behavior, against various transport scenarios.

I also developed a novel framework for authoring and executing complex traffic scenarios in a 3D virtual reality based experimental space for the purpose of sensing human driver behaviors .

Highlights:

- Collaborated with traffic engineers to identify their needs to sense human driving behavior in a 3D virtual reality based experimental space and came up with interesting traffic scenarios, the related hypotheses to prove.

- Built a 3D virtual reality based experimental space for driving behavior data collection.

- Developed an authoring language for traffic scenarios: Scenario Markup Language

- Contributed to the development of 3D visualization of traffic as well as multi-user driving simulation

- Implemented traffic scenarios specified by traffic engineers, in timely fashion to trigger critical events in the 3D virtual reality based experimental space.

- Design and Conducted user- experiments to let human drivers on multi-user driving simulation and expose them to critical events

- Collected human driver responses to critical events, as driving behavioral data.

- Collaborated with traffic engineers to analyze the data to prove a set of hypotheses regarding the traffic scenario under study.

- Reported the experimental results in computing as well as traffic engineering points of view, in high quality journal publications.

Poster related to my PhD thesis research here.

For further details of the results of these research work (the paper related to this work), please see the publication section.

Screen shot of a traffic accident scenario that causes rubbernecking effect:

Screen shot of another traffic accident scenario that causes rubbernecking effect: