Avoiding virtual humans in a constrained environment: Exploration of novel behavioural measures

Abstract

In computer animation, the creation of believable and engaging virtual characters has been a long-lasting endeavour. While researchers investigated several aspects of character design, not many studies focused on the qualities of biological human motion itself. We approached the perception of motion from the perspective of distinct movement patterns which can be observed on people with neurotic and emotionally stable personality traits. We designed an experiment in virtual reality, using a photo-realistic metro scenario, where we studied the avoidance behaviour of participants when encountering these two types of virtual characters in a constrained environment. We also make a contribution by successfully implementing two behavioural measures in particular: a choice task, and a novel ‘turning point’ metric, which calculates the point in the trajectory when people turned to avoid the character. Our results indicate that users’ behaviour is affected by character’s motion and we propose the use of these behavioural measures to investigate other aspects of character motion in future research.