Shaping the Future of Mobility via Virtual Prototyping and Human-In-The-Loop Experimentation
CME Department Seminar
February 6, 2026
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM America/Chicago
Location
ERF Room 1047 and Via ZOOM
Address
842 W. Taylor St., Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FilePresenter: Hyungil Kim, PhD, UIC
Location: ERF Room 1047 and Via ZOOM
Meeting ID: 535 718 1241
Passcode: Lin@842cme
Abstract: As urban transportation evolves into a complex ecosystem of autonomous vehicles, street-level robotics, and aerial drones known as the hybrid mobility society, the transportation community faces critical challenges in ensuring seamless human-systems integration. Traditionally, end-user testing occurs too late in the development lifecycle when physical mockups or working prototypes are available, creating significant technical risks and costly post-deployment adjustments. Even worse, the integration tests are often limited to a micro/individual level, overlooking effects of adding a new mobility solution to the entire transportation ecosystem. To address the challenges, this seminar presents a transformative framework for data-driven future mobility innovation by virtual prototyping and experimentation in immersive virtual environments. By placing the human “in-the-loop” during the earliest stage of design, researchers and developers can simulate, observe, and predict complex interactions within a hybrid mobility society long before physical prototypes are viable or safe for public environments. This approach allows for the collection of behavioral data across diverse operational conditions, effectively de-risking the deployment of novel technologies into existing urban infrastructure. This talk will present three preliminary studies, demonstrating how virtual prototyping and experimentation inform the development and deployment of new mobility solutions. Ultimately, this seminar will provide a strategic roadmap for the future transportation, highlighting how immersive simulation serves as the essential link between visionary concepts and scalable human-centric urban transportation systems of the future.
Speaker Bio: Hyungil Kim is an assistant professor of industrial engineering at the University of Illinois Chicago where he is leading the Human-Centered Engineering Lab (https://sites.google.com/view/human-centered-engineering). He has more than 10 years of research experience in human factors engineering from academia and industry including Oakland University, Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, and General Motors. His current research focuses on human interaction with emerging technologies such as extended reality (XR) and intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). Sponsored by government agencies and industry partners (e.g., US DOT, US Army, GM, Honda, and Google), he has examined human-machine interaction in ITSs through laboratory experimentation, driving simulation, test-track experimentation, and naturalistic driving studies on real roadways. Recently, his team has developed virtual environments to study how people would interact with future urban transportation services such as external human-machine interfaces for robotaxis & urban street robots (Honda), driver interfaces for SAE L3 automated vehicles (GM), and crew stations for remote operations of search & rescue vehicles (US Army).
Kim received a Ph.D. in industrial and systems engineering specializing in human factors and ergonomics from Virginia Tech in 2017. He has served as PI or Co-PI of more than 10 research projects and published more than 30 papers in top-tier journals and conferences such as Human Factors, Transportation Research Record, IEEE Virtual Reality, IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality, ACM Automotive User Interfaces, and ACM Intelligent User Interfaces. He is very active in serving the above research communities as an organizer of international conferences and workshops.
Date posted
Feb 5, 2026
Date updated
Feb 5, 2026