Walk with me: interactions in emotional walking situations, a pilot study

This paper is about interactions between real and virtual humans. We are interested in whole body and emotionally tinted situations of interactions. We focus on the daily situation of walking together. We propose two experiments. In a first experiment, we measure the effect of emotions on the kinematics and metrics of interactions between two walkers. Then, in a second experiment, we reproduce a similar situation of interaction between a real subject and a virtual walker expressing emotions. We perform comparisons between real-real interactions and real-virtual ones. We show promising results: similar effects are observed on the kinematics of interactions in both experiments. We implicitly demonstrate the ability of real subjects to perceive emotions expressed by a virtual character through whole body motion. We show that real subjects' reaction to the behavior of an expressive virtual character complies with their reaction to the behavior of an expressive real human walker. This result is one step toward the use of such virtual reality platform to study social interactions through fully controlled experiments.