Interaction with virtual crowd in Immersive and semi‐Immersive Virtual Reality systems

Article English OPEN
Kyriakou, Marios ; Pan, Xueni ; Chrysanthou, Yiorgos (2016)
  • Publisher: Wiley
This study examines attributes of virtual human behavior that may increase the plausibility of a simulated crowd and affect the user's experience in Virtual Reality. Purpose-developed experiments in both Immersive and semi-Immersive Virtual Reality systems queried the impact of collision and basic interaction between real-users and the virtual crowd and their effect on the apparent realism and ease of navigation within Virtual Reality (VR). Participants' behavior and subjective measurements indicated that facilitating collision avoidance between the user and the virtual crowd makes the virtual characters, the environment, and the whole Virtual Reality system appear more realistic and lifelike. Adding basic social interaction, such as verbal salutations, gaze, and other gestures by the virtual characters towards the user, further contributes to this effect, with the participants reporting a stronger sense of presence. On the other hand, enabling collision avoidance on its own produces a reduced feeling of comfort and ease of navigation in VR. Objective measurements showed another interesting finding that collision avoidance may reduce the user's performance regarding their primary goal (navigating in VR following someone) and that this performance is further reduced when both collision avoidance and social interaction are facilitated.
  • References (31)
    31 references, page 1 of 4

    [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] X. Pan, M. Gillies, C. Barker, D. M. Clark, and M. Slater, “Socially anxious and confident men interact with a forward virtual woman: an experimental study.,” PLoS One, vol. 7, no. 4, p. e32931, Jan. 2012.

    D. Pertaub, M. Slater, and C. Barker, “An experiment on public speaking anxiety in response to three different types of virtual audience,” Presence Teleoperators Virtual Environments, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 68-78, 2002.

    191, no. 8, pp. 509-514, 2003.

    Series B, Biological Sciences, vol. 364, no. 1535, pp. 3549-57, Dec. 2009.

    J. N. Bailenson, J. Blascovich, A. C. Beall, and J. M. Loomis, “Equilibrium Theory Revisited: Mutual Gaze and Personal Space in Virtual Environments,” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, vol. 10, no. 6. pp. 583-598, 2001.

    L. M. Wilcox, R. S. Allison, S. Elfassy, and C. Grelik, “Personal space in virtual reality,” ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 412-428, 2006.

    J. Llobera, B. Spanlang, G. Ruffini, and M. Slater, “Proxemics with Multiple Dynamic Characters in an Immersive Virtual Environment,” ACM Transactions on Applied Perception, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1-12, 2010.

    J. N. Bailenson, J. Blascovich, A. C. Beall, and J. M. Loomis, “Interpersonal distance in immersive virtual environments.,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol. 29, no. 7, pp. 819-833, 2003.

    J. Bruneau, A.-H. Olivier, J. Pettré, J. Pettre, and J. Bruneau, “Going through, going around: a study on individual avoidance of groups,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 520-528, 2015.

    [10] C. Peters and C. Ennis, “Modeling groups of plausible virtual pedestrians.,” IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 29, no. 4, pp. 54-63, 2009.

  • Related Research Results (1)
  • Metrics
    0
    views in OpenAIRE
    0
    views in local repository
    42
    downloads in local repository

    The information is available from the following content providers:

    From Number Of Views Number Of Downloads
    Goldsmiths Research Online - IRUS-UK 0 42
Share - Bookmark