What ImAFUSA’s VR Experiments Reveal About the Public’s Perception of Safety When Drones Fly Overhead

With the ImAFUSA Project concluding on 28/2/2026, the following post was written by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology to provide an overview of their work and results in the project.

By Raffaello Mariani, Associate Professor KTH

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is progressively being integrated, particularly in urban and suburban areas, providing services such as last-mile delivery of goods. Pilot use-cases of emergency medical assistance by drones have been trialed, and feasibility studies of future passenger air-taxi passenger services have been studied.

As integration of these systems is expected to continuously increase, assessing and understanding public acceptance towards these new technologies has become a topic of interest at the research and agency level.

Within the frame of the European Union SESAR Joint Undertaking, the ImAFUSA project has been seeking to evaluate factors that influence citizens’ acceptance of UAM in the European Union.

One of the aspects investigated within ImAFUSA is the perception of safety of citizens when it comes to the operation of drones in urban areas.

Research was conducted by implementing virtual reality scenarios, which were all based on the same urban environment in which drones of a single type were flying, and drone parameters such as flight velocity and flight altitude were varied. All flights were structured, which means that the drones followed recognizable paths.

A still image from the VR environment developed by ISCTE to assess subjects' perceptions of different drone flight scenarios

The scenarios were developed using Unity, and participants had an immersive experience – both visual and audio – using HTC Vive Focus 3 VR equipment, and a survey was conducted verbally as the participants experienced the scenarios.

Questions in the survey, which were kept consistent for each scenario, focused on the assessment of the perceived safety by the participants. Demographic information and familiarity with drones and virtual reality was also assessed to establish potential correlations with safety perception results.

Analysis of the data focused on four pre-determined indicators: drone flight velocity; drone-to-observer distance; drone-to-bystander distance; drone-to-buildings distance. A fifth indicator surfaced from the responses, namely drone-to-drone path direction.

The different structured drone flight paths used to assess subjects' perceptions of safety in the VR experiments

Overall, the results indicate that participants mostly showed a positive level of perceived safety. A common outcome from all four cases was the initial visual recognition of the drones rather than acoustic recognition, as many participants indicated that the expected noise of the drones was too low and overwhelmed by surrounding noise. It is possible that this factor skewed the perception of safety towards a favourable outcome.

Within these set-ups and acknowledged uncertainties, with regards to the first indicator, more than 50% of participants “felt safe” with drones flying up to a velocity of 23m/s, with percentages progressively increasing to more than 80% when velocity was decreased to 15m/s and 7m/s whilst keeping flight altitude constant.

Further, results from the drone-to-observer indicator (or flight altitude) showed that perceived safety increased from approximately 45% to over 75% with increasing flight altitude, as some participants indicated that they had more difficulty identifying the drones at higher altitudes.

Results were less clear-cut when considering the fifth indicator: drone path direction. Here a more even spread of data was visible. What is of interest is that, at the maximum flight altitude, participants’ perception of safety was lower as a result of seeing a more “densely populated” sky section.