Development of a Virtual Reality Traffic Simulation to Analyze Road User Behavior
Ahmad Reza Mohammadi, Peter Y. Park, Mehdi Nourinejad, Muhammed Shijas Babu Cherakkatil · 2025
Traffic safety researchers from various disciplines, including transportation, psychology, education, and health, frequently use virtual reality (VR) traffic simulations in game engines (e.g., Unity) to study road user behavior. A critical limitation of many such studies is simplified traffic simulation, including simplified vehicle-to-vehicle interactions in which vehicles do not respond realistically to each other. This shortcoming may limit the accuracy and practical relevance of the findings for real-world traffic safety improvements. Traffic simulation software such as Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) provides comprehensive traffic simulation based on car-following and lane-changing models, and additional components such as posted speed limit compliance, turning movement behaviors, right-of-way rules, and intersection controls. In this study, we developed a framework for a VR traffic simulation in which a VR user can interact with traffic vehicles generated by SUMO micro-simulation. We developed a process for creating a road network, and a process for integrating SUMO with Unity. We also generated a performance function to evaluate the integration performance. The results showed that the integration successfully generated a realistic traffic simulation.