From November 11–14, 2025, the ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST 2025) was held in Montreal, Canada. Vishal Chauhan (D3) and Yu Asabe (D1) from our laboratory, and Anubhav (D3) from the Department of Mathematical Informatics attended the conference. Researchers from many countries presented work on virtual reality, interaction techniques, and simulation platforms, and there were active discussions in both oral and poster sessions.
Our team presented the full paper **“A Silent Negotiator? Cross-cultural VR Evaluation of Smart Pole Interaction Units in Dynamic Shared Spaces.”** The study introduces the Smart Pole Interaction Unit (SPIU), an infrastructure-based interface that shows clear “STOP/GO” signals to help pedestrians decide when to cross in environments with autonomous vehicles. Using a VR–AWSIM testbed and four challenging traffic scenarios with participants in Japan and Norway, the results showed that SPIU can shorten pedestrians’ decision time and improve perceived usefulness when interacting with autonomous vehicles. We also released our VR–AWSIM environment as open-source code on GitHub (https://github.com/tlab-wide/Smartpole-VR-AWSIM) so other researchers can reproduce and extend our experiments.
Through this experience, we received valuable feedback from international researchers and was able to have insightful conversations in the Q/A sessions and coffee breaks. Especially, there were much interest in under what conditions SPIUs can be more valuable than vehicle eHMIs, and also how easily other people can set up the VR-AWSIM environment. We will use these insights to further improve the concept of SPIU and our VR testing platform.
Below are some photos from the conference, including the poster sessions and our paper presentation.
Publication
