Within a Virtual Crowd: Exploring Human Movement Behavior during Immersive Virtual Crowd Interaction

Nelson

Gubbi

et al. 2020

Behavioral Sciences

Self Cite

This paper describes our investigation on how participants coordinate movement behavior in relation to a virtual crowd that surrounds them while immersed in a virtual environment. The participants were immersed in a virtual metropolitan city and were instructed to cross the road and reach the opposite sidewalk. The participants performed the task ten times. The virtual crowd that surrounded them was scripted to move in the same direction. During the experiment, several measurements were obtained to evaluate human movement coordination. Moreover, the time and direction in which the participants started moving toward the opposite sidewalk were also captured. These data were later used to initialize the parameters of simulated characters that were scripted to become part of the virtual crowd. Measurements were extracted from the simulated characters and used as a baseline to evaluate the movement coordination of the participants. By analyzing the data, significant differences between the movement behaviors of the participants and the simulated characters were found. However, simple linear regression analyses indicated that the movement behavior of participants was moderately associated with the simulated characters’ movements when performing a locomotive task within a virtual crowd population. This study can be considered as a baseline for further research that evaluates the movement coordination of participants during human–virtual-crowd interactions using measurements obtained by the simulated characters.

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Movement Behavior Relationshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Evaluating Human Movement Coordination During Immersive Walking in a Virtual Crowd

Nelson

Gubbi

et al. 2020

Behavioral Sciences

Self Cite

“…They found that neighbor influence is linearly combined, while it decreased with distance but not with lateral position. Finally, Nelson et al 42,43 individually investigated density, speed, and direction variations of a virtual crowd and found that the speed of the virtual crowd affected human movement. They found that both the density and the speed of a crowd affected the movement behavior of the participants.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

I feel a moving crowd surrounds me: Exploring tactile feedback during immersive walking in a virtual crowd

Computer Animation & Virtual

Mousas

Anagnostopoulos

2020

Self Cite

The aim of our study was to investigate whether different tactile feedback conditions could affect the behavior of participants who were instructed to walk within a virtual reality environment surrounded by a virtual crowd of people. A road crossing scenario that takes place in a virtual metropolitan city was developed for this study. Participants were asked to walk toward the opposite sidewalk while wearing a tactile vest. At each road crossing, one of several tactile feedback conditions was generated, including No Tactile, Side Tactile, Back Tactile, Front Tactile, Accurate Tactile, and Random Tactile. During the virtual road crossing, the movement of the participants was captured, and movement‐related measurements were extracted and analyzed to evaluate the effects of tactile feedback on the participant's movement behavior. Additional data were collected through the distribution of a questionnaire to consider self‐reported ratings of the experimental conditions. The results revealed that tactile feedback conditions had significant effects on movement behavior, while the participants' ratings also indicated that they were affected by the tactile feedback conditions. We found that when the participants were immersed in a high‐density crowd simulation, they became sensitive to tactile feedback. However, they were not able to distinguish between the accurate feedback and the random feedback.

Immersive walking in a virtual crowd: The effects of the density, speed, and direction of a virtual crowd on human movement behavior

Computer Animation & Virtual

Nelson

Anagnostopoulos

et al. 2020

Self Cite

We investigated the movement behavior of participants walking within a virtual crowd in an immersive virtual environment. We investigated three different parameters that characterize a moving virtual crowd: density, speed, and direction. An immersive road-crossing scenario that took place in a virtual metropolitan city was created. In this scenario, the participants were instructed to walk toward the opposite sidewalk. Three measurements (speed, deviation, and trajectory length) were used to evaluate the impact of the parameters assigned to the virtual crowd on the movement behavior of the participants. Significant results were found for both the main and interaction effects. The results suggested that the high density, low speed, and diagonal direction situations associated with the virtual crowd had the greatest impacts on the speed, deviation, and trajectory lengths of participants when they walked in a virtual environment and were surrounded by a moving virtual population.