Comparing the route-choice behavior of pedestrians around obstacles in a virtual experiment and a field study

There is a great controversy about the application of virtual experiment in pedestrian routing behavior research. We conducted field observations and virtual experiment to study the route choice behavior of pedestrians. The route choice behavior around obstacles are compared qualitatively. The results shows that distance to the exit routes as well as the density around the exits show great influence on the pedestrians' route choice behavior while the speed of frontal pedestrians shows no obvious impact on the route choice. Pedestrians prefer to choose local closer exit or the exit with less occupants. The results of logistic regression show that the similar results can be obtained in virtual experiment and field observation qualitatively. This work can verify the validity of the virtual experiment for studying route choice behavior of pedestrians, which is of great importance for the application of virtual experiment. The files are trajectories of the recorded videos in the field observation.