Behavior Analysis of Human Locomotion in the Real World and Virtual Reality for the Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

With the rise of immersive visualization techniques, many domains within the manufacturing industry are increasingly validating production processes in virtual reality (VR). The validity of the results gathered in such simulations, however, is widely unknown-in particular with regard to human locomotion behavior. To bridge this gap, this paper presents an experiment, analyzing the behavioral disparity between human locomotion being performed without any equipment and in immersive virtual reality while wearing a head-mounted display (HMD). The presented study (n = 30) is split up in three sections and covers linear walking, non-linear walking and obstacle avoidance. Special care has been given to design the experiment so that findings are generally valid and can be applied to a wide range of domains beyond the manufacturing industry. The findings provide novel insights into the effect of immersive virtual reality on specific gait parameters. In total, a comprehensive sample of 18.09 km is analyzed. The results reveal that the HMD had a medium effect (up to 13%) on walking velocity, on non-linear walking towards an oriented target and on clearance distance. The overall-differences are modeled using multiple regression models, thus allowing the general usage within various domains. Summarizing, it can be concluded that VR can be used to analyze and plan human locomotion, however, specific details may have to be adjusted in order to transfer findings to the real world.

Studying Gaze Behaviour during Collision Avoidance with a Virtual Walker: Influence of the Virtual Reality Setup

“…We found a difference in the average walking speed that was lower in the HMD-W condition: participants wore a HMD but had to move among physical obstacles, which may have induced a safer locomotion speed. This result is also consistent with previous works [1,6].…”

“…The increasing interest in VR tools to perform human experiments stresses the need for validating them, i.e., to compare human behaviour in VR and reality. Several works already performed this comparison for locomotion studies, either considering goal directed [1,10] or collision avoidance tasks [1,6,14,31]. It was shown that virtual and real trajectories have common properties, even if some quantitative differences remain such as slower walking speeds or increased clearance distances.…”

Virtual Field Studies

“…Their collected objective measures, such as walking speed, were similar to real-world norms. Agethen et al [4] conducted similar research where they studied how immersion in a virtual environment affects human locomotion. A comparison with the real world concluded that VR can be used as an evaluation tool for analyzing human locomotion.…”

Toward Virtual Reality-based Evaluation of Robot Navigation among People

“…Then, comparing same tasks performed in VR and in real conditions is required to estimate those biases and avoid misinterpretations of experimental results. Such comparisons have been done for many different studies: locomotion toward a goal [1,8], collision avoidance [1,5,16,30], personal space [19,28], etc. Also, HRI experiments in VR in [23] explore the bias when the human only is immersed in VR.…”