Abstract: Drivers, environmental factors, perceptual limitations, and distractions typically dictate how vulnerable road users (i.e., pedestrians) perform while crossing the street at signalized and/or unsignalized crosswalks. As a result, recent Virginia law § 46.2-924 indicates that the driver of any vehicle on a highway shall stop when any pedestrian is crossing at any clearly marked crosswalk, whether at mid-block, at the end of any block, or any regular pedestrian crossing while also stating that no pedestrian shall enter or cross an intersection in disregard of approaching traffic. With this in mind, the Tesseract was created as a modular testbed for investigating critical factors associated with how vulnerable road users navigate crosswalk situations - especially during acoustically distracted unsafe crossings on university campuses. The purpose is to better understand crossing behavior in a safe, controllable, and repeatable scientific acoustic 4 environment. This presentation will consist of an overview of the Tesseract design, how it can be recreated, and how it is being utilized as a 1:1 acoustically immersive mixed reality crosswalk testbed (physical and portable).

Mr. Nikolas Stankovic is a M.S. student in the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA. He is currently a graduate research assistant within the Human IMPaC-T Lab under the advisement of Rafael N.C. Patrick, Ph.D. His work specializes in sound design, auditory interfaces, and immersive audio environments. He is expected to graduate in 2024 with a concentration in Human Factors Engineering.