Walking in a Crowd Full of Virtual Characters: Effects of Virtual Character Appearance on Human Movement Behavior

Nelson, Michael G.; Mazumdar, Angshuman; Jamal, Saad; Chen, Yingjie; Mousas, Christos

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-64556-4_48

Cited by 9 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Previous work showed that a virtual agent's appearance influenced co-presence (Bailenson et al, 2005). Nelson et al (2020) found that virtual agents' appearance influences users' movement speed and their interpersonal distance to the agents. In social VR applications, another user's avatar's appearance influences whether and how others approach this user (Freeman and Maloney, 2021).…”

Section: The Virtual Appearance Of Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affordable But Not Cheap: A Case Study of the Effects of Two 3D-Reconstruction Methods of Virtual Humans

Bartl

Wenninger

Wolf

et al. 2021

Front. Virtual Real.

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Realistic and lifelike 3D-reconstruction of virtual humans has various exciting and important use cases. Our and others’ appearances have notable effects on ourselves and our interaction partners in virtual environments, e.g., on acceptance, preference, trust, believability, behavior (the Proteus effect), and more. Today, multiple approaches for the 3D-reconstruction of virtual humans exist. They significantly vary in terms of the degree of achievable realism, the technical complexities, and finally, the overall reconstruction costs involved. This article compares two 3D-reconstruction approaches with very different hardware requirements. The high-cost solution uses a typical complex and elaborated camera rig consisting of 94 digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras. The recently developed low-cost solution uses a smartphone camera to create videos that capture multiple views of a person. Both methods use photogrammetric reconstruction and template fitting with the same template model and differ in their adaptation to the method-specific input material. Each method generates high-quality virtual humans ready to be processed, animated, and rendered by standard XR simulation and game engines such as Unreal or Unity. We compare the results of the two 3D-reconstruction methods in an immersive virtual environment against each other in a user study. Our results indicate that the virtual humans from the low-cost approach are perceived similarly to those from the high-cost approach regarding the perceived similarity to the original, human-likeness, beauty, and uncanniness, despite significant differences in the objectively measured quality. The perceived feeling of change of the own body was higher for the low-cost virtual humans. Quality differences were perceived more strongly for one’s own body than for other virtual humans.

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Section: The Virtual Appearance Of Othersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Affordable But Not Cheap: A Case Study of the Effects of Two 3D-Reconstruction Methods of Virtual Humans

Bartl

Wenninger

Wolf

et al. 2021

Front. Virtual Real.

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“…The exploratory study conducted by Moustafa and Steed 35 found that group dynamics get carried over into the virtual world, with the only drawback being proper avatar implementation. 36 This article explores the use of an optimization-based method to optimize affective multicharacter virtual reality experiences. In the past, such techniques have been used for matters of adaptability or replayability in games, 37,38 since such techniques provide the ability to design games that adapt to a variety of constraints and parameters, both during the initialization process and before the game starts.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synthesizing affective virtual reality multicharacter experiences

Mazumdar

Mousas

2021

Computer Animation & Virtual

Self Cite

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This article presents a methodology for automatically synthesizing a virtual population (pedestrians placed in a virtual environment) that impacts a user with a specified affective experience. The pipeline began by developing a dataset of behaviors that could be assigned to virtual characters. Next, an annotation phase assigned affective responses of participants to each character's behavior. The design considerations of our affective multicharacter virtual reality experience were then encoded to cost terms and assigned to a total cost function. This method allowed the developer to control the priority and the targets of the cost terms, and given the user inputs, our application could optimize the multicharacter experience using a Markov chain Monte Carlo method known as simulated annealing. A user study was conducted to investigate whether our method could synthesize virtual reality multicharacter experiences that affect participants in an expected way. The results of our study showed that the three different synthesized multicharacter experiences (low, medium, and high negative affect) were perceived as expected by participants; therefore, we argue that we can indeed automatically synthesize virtual reality multicharacter experiences that impact participants' affect levels in an expected way. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.

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A Virtual Reality Framework for Human-Virtual Crowd Interaction Studies

Nelson

Mousas

2020

2020 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR)

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Walking in a Crowd Full of Virtual Characters: Effects of Virtual Character Appearance on Human Movement Behavior

Cited by 9 publications

References 28 publications

Affordable But Not Cheap: A Case Study of the Effects of Two 3D-Reconstruction Methods of Virtual Humans

Affordable But Not Cheap: A Case Study of the Effects of Two 3D-Reconstruction Methods of Virtual Humans

Synthesizing affective virtual reality multicharacter experiences

A Virtual Reality Framework for Human-Virtual Crowd Interaction Studies

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