Virtual reality Experiment to study the Role of social Conformity in the acceptance of Autonomous vehicles

上下文。世界各地的许多政府都在推出新的计划，以促进和预测最近自动化的快速发展。在这种国际格局中，英国发挥着主导作用。正如国会议员约翰·海斯所说：“英国越来越被视为世界上联网和自动驾驶汽车的最佳地点之一”(Cohen等人，2017年)。自动驾驶汽车的经济和社会效益预计将是巨大的(高达GDP的17万亿欧元)。但是，如果用户不采用这项技术，这些好处可能会受到威胁。最近由英国交通部委托进行的范围界定研究(Cohen等人，2017)明确指出，如果不同时询问是否会有大量消费者对购买/使用此类产品感兴趣，以及广泛部署是否会被社会接受，就不可能说完全自动化是否会发生(表面上是一个技术问题)。因此，几乎所有关于自动取款机的有用问题都至少有社会或行为方面的因素。为了回应这一迫切需求，该项目旨在利用虚拟现实技术，在过去十年中，计算机游戏取得了重大进展，在科学的背景下使用它们来理解并模拟用户对全自动驾驶汽车(BESS)的接受程度。该项目旨在了解公民在什么条件下可以接受搬家(居住、工作等)。为了实现研究的总体目标，该项目设定了以下具体目标：-了解我们对这种高度技术和创新产品的熟悉程度，以及我们周围的其他人(我们认识的人，也包括我们不认识的人)对帮助的接受程度，以及他们在接受帮助时的行为。-开发一种新的方法来研究对创新产品的接受程度，其中包括一种从客户那里收集信息的方法和一种分析这些数据的方法，这些数据可以用来做出影响公民日常生活的政策和行业决策。-测试为帮助人们(特别是像老年人这样的特定类别的人)在即将到来的新技术城市环境中生活和适应而创建的实验的好处。潜在的应用和好处。这项研究将为有关采用和传播优惠以及应该给予政策激励以培育市场的批判性讨论增加广泛的价值。这项研究的结果将对社会、经济、工业和学术产生影响。这项研究的结果将使BESS的经济和社会效益得以量化，其中重要的潜在效益是降低与(英国和世界各地的)政府目前正在进行的AVS部署的巨额投资相关的风险。该项目的这些成果还将指导地方和国家政府制定政策，促进这些技术和服务的可持续、快速和最小干扰的增长，以更具成本效益的方式投资公共资金。虚拟现实环境对社会环境的可用性将为新的应用打开机会。所创建的VR环境的应用可能会扩展到研究自闭症病例，在这些病例中，VR实验已经被证明提供了显著的好处。

Context. Many governments worldwide are introducing new plans to promote and anticipate the recent rapid development of automation. In this international scenario, the UK is playing a leading role. As stated by John Hayes MP "The UK is increasingly seen as one of the best places in the world for connected and autonomous vehicles" (Cohen et al., 2017). The economic and societal benefits of autonomous vehicles are foreseen to be enormous (up to Euros 17tn to GDP). But, these benefits could be jeopardised if users fail to adopt the technology. The recent scoping study (Cohen et al., 2017) commissioned by the Department for Transport, clearly highlights that "it is impossible to say whether full automation will happen (ostensibly a technical question) without asking at the same time whether there would be a substantial consumer interest in purchasing/using such products and whether widespread deployment would be societally acceptable. Hence, almost all useful questions about AVs have at least a social or behavioural component." In response to this urgent need, the project aims to take advantage of virtual reality technologies, which have made significant progress in the last decade in computer games, to use them in a scientific context to understand and then model users' acceptance of Fully Autonomous Vehicles (FAVs). The project aims to understand what are the conditions under which citizens will accept to move (live, work etc.) in an urban environment where traffic will include FAVs or it will be formed only of FAVs and use them as a public transport system.In order to achieve the research overall aim, the project set the following specific objectives:- Understand to which extent the acceptance of FAVS is affected by how much familiar we can get with this highly technological and innovative product and by what other people around us (people we know but also people that we do not know) think about and how they behave with respect to FAVs. - Develop a new method for studying acceptance of innovative products, which includes a method to collect the information from customers and a method to analyse this data that can be used then to take policy and industrial decisions that affect every day citizens' life.- Test the benefit of the experiment created to be used across the population to help people (in particular specific categories like older people) to live in and adapt to the forthcoming new technological urban environments.Potential applications and benefits. This research will add extensive value to the critical discussions about adoption and diffusion of FAVs and about the policy incentives that should be given to foster the market. The results from this research will have Social, Economic, Industrial and Academic impacts. The results from this research will allow the quantification of the economic and societal benefits of FAVs with the important potential benefit of reducing the risks associated with the current huge investments that governments (in the UK and worldwide) are currently making on AVs deployment. These results from this project will also guide local and national governments to develop policies that can facilitate the sustainable, rapid, and least-disruptive growth of these technologies and services, investing public money in a more cost-effective way. The usability of Virtual Reality environment to social contexts will open opportunities for new applications. The application of the VR environment created can potentially be extended to study cases of autism where VR experiments have already proved to provide significant benefits.