Seeing What the Vehicle Sees: Video-Augmented Virtual Reality for Physical Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles are expected to improve road safety and efficiency, but passengers often remain uncertain about what the vehicle perceives and why it acts as it does. Virtual reality (VR) offers a safe and repeatable medium for presenting this information, yet most passenger-facing VR studies rely on fully simulated vehicles or pre-scripted scenarios, so the motion and perception shown to the user do not originate from a physically operating autonomous system. This paper presents a video-augmented VR framework that couples a physical ROS 2 autonomous robot vehicle to a Unity 6 application deployed on a Meta Quest 3S headset. The vehicle state and live onboard camera stream are transmitted over two independent communication channels, allowing the virtual vehicle to mirror the physical robot's motion while the passenger simultaneously views the vehicle's first-person camera feed and its navigation decisions through an in-vehicle dashboard interface. We evaluate the framework over 20 repeated closed-loop navigation trials. The system achieves a mean state-update latency of 29.63 ms, a mean relative route-progress error of 2.28% between the physical and virtual vehicles, and video delivery at 10.006 frames per second with 0.25% frame loss. All monitored navigation decisions were correctly reflected in the VR interface with no missed or incorrect notifications. The results indicate that the framework can support temporally synchronized, semantically consistent, and accurate route-progress representation for immersive observation of physical autonomous-vehicle behavior.