Walking with Virtual People: Evaluation of Locomotion Interfaces in Dynamic Environments

Anne-Helene Olivier, Julien Bruneau, Richard Kulpa, Julien Pettre
2018 IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics  
Fig. 1 . The objective of this article is to evaluate whether small scale interactions during locomotion between a real user and a virtual human (right) are similar in virtual conditions in comparison with real ones (left). Abstract-Navigating in virtual environments requires using some locomotion interfaces, especially when the dimensions of the environments exceed the ones of the Virtual Reality system. Locomotion interfaces induce some biases both in the perception of the self-motion or in
more » ... e formation of virtual locomotion trajectories. These biases have been mostly evaluated in the context of static environments, and studies need to be revisited in the new context of populated environments where users interact with virtual characters. We focus on situations of collision avoidance between a real participant and a virtual character, and compared it to previous studies on real walkers. Our results show that, as in reality, the risk of future collision is accurately anticipated by participants, however with delay. We also show that collision avoidance trajectories formed in VR have common properties with real ones, with some quantitative differences in avoidance distances. More generally, our evaluation demonstrates that reliable results can be obtained for qualitative analysis of small scale interactions in VR. We discuss these results in the perspective of a VR platform for large scale interaction applications, such as in a crowd, for which real data are difficult to gather.
doi:10.1109/tvcg.2017.2714665 pmid:28613177 fatcat:57eanj64kfhwnafuwyraducory