Evaluating Human Movement Coordination During Immersive Walking in a Virtual Crowd

Abstract

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.

Human‐virtual crowd interaction: Towards understanding the effects of crowd avoidance proximity in an immersive virtual environment

“…Based on our observations, several also tried to explore the environment when moving toward the target position; therefore, they followed longer paths and needed more time to reach the target spot. Considering previously conducted research on human‐virtual crowd interaction 8,20 that discusses how crowd density could impact study participants' coordination behavior and research on avoidance behavior with virtual characters, 14,43,46 we can say that our participants felt safe walking in the virtual environment. They were aware that in a high avoidance proximity condition, they would have enough space to perform the task without risking potential collisions with the virtual characters.…”

“…Virtual environments can evoke responses similar to those occurring in the physical world, 17‐19 and understanding the influence of virtual crowds on the manner by which humans conduct themselves can be beneficial in the development of more immersive applications in the future 5 . Furthermore, virtual environments are safe for participants and advantageous to simulations of the same condition for each participant in a controlled laboratory environment 20 …”

“…5 Furthermore, virtual environments are safe for participants and advantageous to simulations of the same condition for each participant in a controlled laboratory environment. 20 Several studies have been conducted to understand the movement behaviors of humans according to the walking conditions present in virtual environments. 14,15 For instance, researchers have explored collision avoidance between humans and virtual characters [21][22][23] or virtual crowd agents.…”

Being an older person: modulation of walking speed with geriatric walking motion avatars

“…The representation that takes the place of the real body in VR space is called an avatar. As well as research findings in real space (Rio et al, 2014), research has shown that human walking speed, deviation, and trajectory length are influenced by walking in a virtual environment surrounded by a moving virtual avatar population (Koilias et al, 2020). In addition to virtual crowds, silhouettes and moving point-light dots on walls affect walking speed when perceived as the walking motion of humans (Tanizaki et al, 2021).…”

The Untapped Potential of Virtual Reality in Rehabilitation of Balance and Gait in Neurological Disorders

“…In postural tasks, a similar phenomenon of synchronization of postural sway is observed when individuals are standing and having a physical contact ( Reynolds and Osler, 2014 ), while looking at each other ( Okazaki et al, 2015 ) or while sharing a cooperative verbal task ( Shockley et al, 2003 ). Given the flexibility and control afforded by VR, virtual humans can also be used to “cue” and modulate behavior, as demonstrated through different studies which have examined instantaneous effects on locomotion ( Meerhoff et al, 2017 ; Meerhoff et al, 2019 ; Koilias et al, 2020 ). While promising as a tool for rehabilitation, however, evidence of effectiveness of external cueing through virtual humans as an intervention either for posture or locomotion remains to be established.…”