  A novel head-mounted virtual immersive/interactive reality environment (VIRE)
is utilized to evaluate the behaviour of participants in three pedestrian road
crossing conditions while 1) not distracted, 2) distracted with a smartphone,
and 3) distracted with a smartphone with a virtually implemented safety measure
on the road. Forty-two volunteers participated in our research who completed
thirty successful (complete crossing) trials in blocks of ten trials for each
crossing condition. For the two distracted conditions, pedestrians are engaged
in a maze-solving game on a virtual smartphone, while at the same time checking
the traffic for a safe crossing gap. For the proposed safety measure, smart
flashing and color changing LED lights are simulated on the crosswalk to warn
the distracted pedestrian who initiates crossing. Surrogate safety measures as
well as speed information and distraction attributes such as direction and
orientation of participant's head were collected and evaluated by employing a
Multinomial Logit (MNL) model. Results from the model indicate that females
have more dangerous crossing behaviour especially in distracted conditions;
however, the smart LED treatment reduces this negative impact. Moreover, the
number of times and the percentage of duration the head was facing the
smartphone during a trial and a waiting time respectively increase the
possibility of unsafe crossings; though, the proposed treatment reduces the
safety crossing rate. Hence, our study shows that the smart LED light safety
treatment indeed improves the safety of distracted pedestrians and enhances the
successful crossing rate.
