In crisis management, critical sites are required to carry out regular exercises to be prepared for a potential crisis. However, those exercises present a lot of drawbacks that reduce their efficiency: among other things, they are not frequent enough, not adjustable enough, too demanding and they are very expensive. The EGCERSIS project aims at using virtual reality to make fully configurable exercises to train in digital twins of actual critical sites. In this article, we present this project through a simple use case of a crisis in a subway station, involving three actors of crisis management.

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Crisis Management Exercises in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies are widely employed to investigate human behavior in dangerous situations that cannot be safely reproduced in the real world, allowing researchers to study in an ecological way complex scenarios such as training for risky jobs, safety procedures, emergencies and, more recently, moral dilemmas in driving context. Understanding how people act when facing severe accidents involving unavoidable collisions has extremely important implications for the design and development of the “decisional system” of Autonomous Vehicles (AV s). However, previous studies have not focused on the differences between being the driver acting in a complex moral situation or being in a self-driving car that chooses for you. In the present paper, we described a case study that uses a first-person virtual reality simulation to investigate people's emotional reactions, perceived sense of responsibility, and acceptability of moral behavior in human and autonomous driving modalities. The main findings showed that participants experienced a high sense of presence in our simulation and react differently to the two driving conditions, showing a greater arousal, a more negative valence, and an increased sense of responsibility when faced moral dilemmas as drivers. Instead, in scenarios that did not involve killing someone (non-moral dilemmas), being in a fully autonomous vehicle was judged less pleasant than being the actual driver. These results suggest that people prefer to be in control only in common driving situations and not when their actions have deadly consequences on other people, suggesting the need to consider emotional factors in studying decision-making applied to autonomous vehicles, as a mean to reach a more complete understanding of people's reactions to this new technology, and to possibly gain insights for the design of autonomous driving systems and, more generally, AI-driven machines.

Virtual Morality: Using Virtual Reality to Study Moral Behavior in Extreme Accident Situations

One of the strengths of virtual reality (VR) is to provide a highly realistic user experience. How would VR's power of realism affect political decision-making, for example, when experienced by citizens before they cast their vote on an issue? We set out to empirically assess if and how voting information presented in VR would influence people's voting behavior, compared to the traditional text presentation format. In a 2 (format: text vs. VR) × 2 (argumentation: pro vs. con) between-subject factorial experiment, we assessed participants' voting behavior on a fictitious popular initiative. We first asked all participants (N = 179) to cast their vote based on a brief text, inspired by the traditional Swiss voting booklet (baseline). We then randomly assigned participants to one of four experimental conditions containing the same pro or con arguments concerning the voting issue. Participants could then adjust their previously-cast vote. This was followed by retrospective interviews (N = 32) to gain deeper insights into the decision-making process of the participants. Our study shows that the presentation format has a reinforcing effect, that is, leading to more YES votes for the VR group, and fewer YES votes for the text group. Irrespective of the pro or con arguments, participants show an overall increase in YES votes in VR, which is not the case for the text group. We identified six factors that may have led to this positive change with VR: (1) the affirmative power of images, (2) the vividness of immersive images, (3) first-person storytelling and storyliving, (4) the greater affordances of VR for engagement through interaction, (5) the design of the VR environment, and (6) the novelty of the VR technology.

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Virtual Reality as a Tool for Political Decision-Making? An Empirical Study on the Power of Immersive Images on Voting Behavior

objections to it. Finally, I provide some reflections about the means and ends of trolley-like scenarios and other sacrificial dilem- mas in experimental ethics.

Hit by the Virtual Trolley: When is Experimental Ethics Unethical?

The development of electric tracked vehicle is gradually mature, but the research on its virtual simulation and verification has the problem of single function and poor authenticity. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a virtual simulation platform for electric tracked vehicle based on virtual reality fusion. The platform uses three-dimensional digital prototype technology to complete the modeling including the motion scene, the whole vehicle and the transmission mechanism respectively, and uses the standard CAD interface to complete the data transformation. CAN bus communication is used to obtain the real movement state of external vehicles in real time by developing data transmission interface. Real-time control of vehicle model and virtual assembly display based on Unity 3D. Virtual simulation results show that the platform can complete the assembly and kinematic verification of vehicles, which can guide the optimization design verification of digital prototype.

Motion Simulation of Electric Tracked Vehicle Based on Virtual Reality Fusion

Virtual reality (VR) has been widely utilized for training and education purposes because of pedagogical, safety, and economic benefits. The investigation of moral judgment is a particularly interesting VR application, related to training. For this study, we designed a within-subject experiment manipulating the role of study participants in a Trolley Dilemma scenario: either victim or driver. We conducted a pilot study with four participants and describe preliminary results and implications in this poster.

Peter Cowal

Papers

Advancing Ethical Decision Making in Virtual Reality