Eye Gaze-Informed and Context-Aware Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction in Shared Spaces with Automated Shuttles: A Virtual Reality Study

The integration of Automated Shuttles into shared urban spaces presents unique challenges due to the absence of traffic rules and the complex pedestrian interactions. Accurately anticipating pedestrian behavior in such unstructured environments is therefore critical for ensuring both safety and efficiency. This paper presents a Virtual Reality (VR) study that captures how pedestrians interact with automated shuttles across diverse scenarios, including varying approach angles and navigating in continuous traffic. We identify critical behavior patterns present in pedestrians' decision-making in shared spaces, including hesitation, evasive maneuvers, gaze allocation, and proxemic adjustments. To model pedestrian behavior, we propose GazeX-LSTM, a multimodal eye gaze-informed and context-aware prediction model that integrates pedestrians' trajectories, fine-grained eye gaze dynamics, and contextual factors. We shift prediction from a vehicle- to a human-centered perspective by leveraging eye-tracking data to capture pedestrian attention. We systematically validate the unique and irreplaceable predictive power of eye gaze over head orientation alone, further enhancing performance by integrating contextual variables. Notably, the combination of eye gaze data and contextual information produces super-additive improvements on pedestrian behavior prediction accuracy, revealing the complementary relationship between visual attention and situational contexts. Together, our findings provide the first evidence that eye gaze-informed modeling fundamentally advances pedestrian behavior prediction and highlight the critical role of situational contexts in shared-space interactions. This paves the way for safer and more adaptive automated vehicle technologies that account for how people perceive and act in complex shared spaces.