Within a Virtual Crowd: Exploring Human Movement Behavior during Immersive Virtual Crowd Interaction

This paper presents an exploratory study aiming at investigating the movement behavior of participants when immersed within a virtual crowd. Specifically, a crosswalk scenario was created in which a virtual crowd was scripted to cross the road once the traffic light turned green. Participants were also instructed to walk across the road to the opposite sidewalk. During that time, the assessment of participant movement behavior was captured by the use of objective measurements (time, speed, and deviation). Five density conditions (no density, low density, medium density, high density, and extreme density) were developed to investigate which had the greatest effect on the movement behavior of the participants. The results obtained indicated that the extreme density condition of the virtual crowd did indeed alter the movement behavior of participants to a significant degree. Given that density had the greatest effect on the movement behavior of participants, a follow-up study was also conducted that utilized the density findings and explored whether density can affect the speed and direction of participants. This was achieved through examining five speed conditions and six directional conditions. The follow-up study provided some evidence that during an extreme density condition the speed of the crowd also affects the movement behavior of participants. However, no alteration in human movement behavior was observed when examining the direction of the virtual crowd. Implications for future research are discussed.