The present study investigates users' movement behavior in a virtual environment when they attempted to avoid a virtual character. At each iteration of the experiment, four conditions (Self-Avatar LookAt, No Self-Avatar LookAt, Self-Avatar No LookAt, and No Self-Avatar No LookAt) were applied to examine users' movement behavior based on kinematic measures. During the experiment, 52 participants were asked to walk from a starting position to a target position. A virtual character was placed at the midpoint. Participants were asked to wear a head-mounted display throughout the task, and their locomotion was captured using a motion capture suit. We analyzed the captured trajectories of the participants' routes on four kinematic measures to explore whether the four experimental conditions influenced the paths they took. The results indicated that the Self-Avatar LookAt condition affected the path the participants chose more significantly than the other three conditions in terms of length, duration, and deviation, but not in terms of speed. Overall, the length and duration of the task, as well as the deviation of the trajectory from the straight line, were greater when a self-avatar represented participants. An additional effect on kinematic measures was found in the LookAt (Gaze) conditions. Implications for future research are discussed.
In addition, gaze interaction has been examined during walking tasks. The study conducted by @cite_26 indicated that more personal space was given to virtual characters by the users who engaged in mutual gaze. @cite_37 found that the gaze of a virtual character toward a walking user improved the sense of immersion. @cite_9 found that participants used their gaze as a cue to avoid collision by changing their path to the opposite side of the character's gaze. Finally, the virtual reality study conducted by @cite_32 examined the effect of gaze interception during collision avoidance between two walkers. The authors concluded that the mutual gaze can be considered as a form of nonverbal communication between participants and virtual characters.
@cite_9 @cite_37 @cite_26 @cite_32
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This study shows that humans (a) infer other people's movement trajectories from their gaze direction and (b) use this information to guide their own visual scanning of the environment and plan their own movement. In two eye-tracking experiments, participants viewed an animated character walking directly toward them on a street. The character looked constantly to the left or to the right (Experiment 1) or suddenly shifted his gaze from direct to the left or to the right (Experiment 2). Participants had to decide on which side they would skirt the character. They shifted their gaze toward the direction in which the character was not gazing, that is, away from his gaze, and chose to skirt him on that side. Gaze following is not always an obligatory social reflex; social-cognitive evaluations of gaze direction can lead to reversed gaze-following behavior. We present a novel interactive approach, PedVR, to generate plausible behaviors for a large number of virtual humans, and to enable natural interaction between the real user and virtual agents. Our formulation is based on a coupled approach that combines a 2D multi-agent navigation algorithm with 3D human motion synthesis. The coupling can result in plausible movement of virtual agents and can generate gazing behaviors, which can considerably increase the believability. We have integrated our formulation with the DK-2 HMD and demonstrate the benefits of our crowd simulation algorithm over prior decoupled approaches. Our user evaluation suggests that the combination of coupled methods and gazing behavior can considerably increase the behavioral plausibility. Digital immersive virtual environment technology (IVET) enables behavioral scientists to conduct ecologically realistic experiments with near-perfect experimental control. The authors employed IVET to study the interpersonal distance maintained between participants and virtual humans. In Study 1, participants traversed a three-dimensional virtual room in which a virtual human stood. In Study 2, a virtual human approached participants. In both studies, participant gender, virtual human gender, virtual human gaze behavior, and whether virtual humans were allegedly controlled by humans (i.e., avatars) or computers (i.e., agents) were varied. Results indicated that participants maintained greater distance from virtual humans when approaching their fronts compared to their backs. In addition, participants gave more personal space to virtual agents who engaged them in mutual gaze. Moreover, when virtual humans invaded their personal space, participants moved farthest from virtual human agents. The advantages an... This paper presents a study performed in virtual reality on the effect of gaze interception during collision avoidance between two walkers. In such a situation, mutual gaze can be considered as a form of nonverbal communication. Additionally, gaze is believed to detail future path intentions and to be part of the nonverbal negotiation to achieve avoidance collaboratively. We considered an avoidance task between a real subject and a virtual human character and studied the influence of the character's gaze direction on the avoidance behaviour of the participant. Virtual reality provided an accurate control of the situation: seventeen participants were immersed in a virtual environment, instructed to navigate across a virtual space using a joystick and to avoid a virtual character that would appear from either side. The character would either gaze or not towards the participant. Further, the character would either perform or not a reciprocal adaptation of its trajectory to avoid a potential collision with the participant. The findings of this paper were that during an orthogonal collision avoidance task, gaze behaviour did not influence the collision avoidance behaviour of the participants. Further, the addition of reciprocal collision avoidance with gaze did not modify the collision behaviour of participants. These results suggest that for the duration of interaction in such a task, body motion cues were sufficient for coordination and regulation. We discuss the possible exploitation of these results to improve the design of virtual characters for populated virtual environments and user interaction.