Evaluating collision avoidance effects on discomfort in virtual environments

Dynamic, moving characters are increasingly a part of interactive virtual experiences enabled by immersive display technologies such as head-mounted displays (HMDs). In this new context, it is important to consider the impact their behavior has on user experiences. Here, we explore the role collision avoidance between virtual agents and the VR user plays on overall comfort and perceptual experience in an immersive virtual environment. Several users participated in an experiment were they were asked to walk through a dense stream of virtual agents who may or may not be using collision avoidance techniques to avoid them. When collision avoidance was used participants took more direct paths, with less jittering or backtracking, and found the resulting simulated motion to be less intimidating, more realistic, and more comfortable.