Studying Gaze Behaviour during Collision Avoidance with a Virtual Walker: Influence of the Virtual Reality Setup

Simulating realistic interactions between virtual characters has been of interest to research communities for years, and is particularly important to automatically populate virtual environments. This problem requires to accurately understand and model how humans interact, which can be difficult to assess. In this context, Virtual Reality (VR) is a powerful tool to study human behaviour, especially as it allows assessing conditions which are both ecological and controlled. While VR was shown to allow realistic collision avoidance adaptations, in the frame of the ecological theory of perception and action, interactions between walkers can not solely be characterized through motion adaptations but also through the perception processes involved in such interactions. The objective of this paper is therefore to evaluate how different VR setups influence gaze behaviour during collision avoidance tasks between walkers. To this end, we designed an experiment involving a collision avoidance task between a participant and another walker (real confederate or virtual character). During this task, we compared both the partici-pant`s locomotion and gaze behaviour in a real environment and the same situation in different VR setups (including a CAVE, a screen and a Head-Mounted Display). Our results show that even if some quantitative differences exist, gaze behaviour is qualitatively similar between VR and real conditions. Especially, gaze behaviour in VR setups including a HMD is more in line with the real situation than the other setups. Furthermore, the outcome on motion adaptations confirms previous work, where collision avoidance behaviour is qualitatively similar in VR and real conditions. In conclusion, our results show that VR has potential for qualitative analysis of locomotion and gaze behaviour during collision avoidance. This opens perspectives in the design of new experiments to better understand human behaviour, in order to design more realistic virtual humans.