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

This paper focuses on understanding how study participants interact and perceive a virtual crowd in an immersive virtual environment. Specifically, our within-group exploratory study investigated how avoidance proximity variations (i.e., low, medium, and high avoidance proximity [defined as avoidance radius]) assigned to crowd agents impacted participants' interaction with the virtual crowd. During the study, we instructed our participants to walk in a virtual environment. At the same time, we had a virtual crowd scripted to walk toward the start position of the participant following a straight path. During the participants' walking task, we collected movement data (i.e., trajectory length and completion time) and immediately after each experimental condition, we asked participants to self-report their experience (i.e., co-presence, behavioral independence, crowd realism, crowd interaction realism, perceived politeness, and emotional reactivity). Based on the collected data, we found that when we exposed our participants to the high avoidance proximity condition, they: (1) followed longer paths, (2) spent more time reaching the target goal, (3) rated the virtual crowd less polite, (4) rated the virtual crowd and their interaction with the virtual crowd less realistic, (5) rated the behavior independence of the virtual crowd lower, and (6) self-reported higher emotional reactivity. We discuss our findings and suggestions for further research on human-virtual crowd interaction.