Evaluation of road safety education program with virtual reality eye tracking

Traffic rules are essential and part of today’s road safety education programs at school. However, learning how to properly use attention in complex traffic situations has never before been a focus when teaching pupils. A new road safety education program based on latest findings in Neuro-Education has been developed. In the program, pupil learned three new concepts: risk, orientation and attention. This to stimulate the pupil’s reflection about own behavior on school roads, before attended a session at a traffic center, where teachers encouraged pupil’s reflection about how to practically use their new knowledge about the three concepts. This new program design was evaluated in a Virtual Reality laboratory. This paper presents the approach for evaluation using VR and eye-tracking, including scenario building, measurement approach, and procedure for measurements in addition to a look at the actual evaluation results. The results showed that pupils managed to cycle in a safer way by putting their attention at the right places after the course compared to student following existing curriculum. As such the selected validation approach utilizing VR gave clear support for the proposed education program.