Crowd Navigation in VR: Exploring Haptic Rendering of Collisions

Virtual reality (VR) is a valuable experimental tool for studying human movement, including the analysis of interactions during locomotion tasks for developing crowd simulation algorithms. However, these studies are generally limited to distant interactions in crowds, due to the difficulty of render...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 2022-07, Vol.28 (7), p.2589-2601
Main Authors: Berton, Florian, Grzeskowiak, Fabien, Bonneau, Alexandre, Jovane, Alberto, Aggravi, Marco, Hoyet, Ludovic, Olivier, Anne-Helene, Pacchierotti, Claudio, Pettre, Julien
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Collisions
Computer Graphics
Computer Science
Computer Simulation
Crowd
Feedback
Graphics
Haptic interfaces
haptic rendering
Haptic Technology
Haptics
human interaction
Human motion
Humans
Locomotion
Navigation
Railway stations
Rendering
Rendering (computer graphics)
Solid modeling
Task analysis
Trajectory
Virtual environments
Virtual Reality
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Summary:Virtual reality (VR) is a valuable experimental tool for studying human movement, including the analysis of interactions during locomotion tasks for developing crowd simulation algorithms. However, these studies are generally limited to distant interactions in crowds, due to the difficulty of rendering realistic sensations of collisions in VR. In this article, we explore the use of wearable haptics to render contacts during virtual crowd navigation. We focus on the behavioral changes occurring with or without haptic rendering during a navigation task in a dense crowd, as well as on potential after-effects introduced by the use haptic rendering. Our objective is to provide recommendations for designing VR setup to study crowd navigation behavior. To the end, we designed an experiment (N=23) where participants navigated in a crowded virtual train station without, then with, and then again without haptic feedback of their collisions with virtual characters. Results show that providing haptic feedback improved the overall realism of the interaction, as participants more actively avoided collisions. We also noticed a significant after-effect in the users' behavior when haptic rendering was once again disabled in the third part of the experiment. Nonetheless, haptic feedback did not have any significant impact on the users' sense of presence and embodiment.
ISSN:1077-2626
1941-0506
DOI:10.1109/TVCG.2020.3041341