Effects of Interacting with a Crowd of Emotional Virtual Humans on Users’ Affective and Non-Verbal Behaviors

In this contribution we examined the effects on users during interaction with a virtual human crowd in an immersive virtual reality environment. We developed an agent-based crowd model with rich properties including eye gaze, facial expression, body motion, and verbal and non-verbal behaviors. The scenario was a virtual market in which the users needed to gather specific items. In a betweensubjects design, users interacted with a virtual human crowd that showed opposite valenced emotional expressions. There are four conditions in the between-subjects design. These includes different affective virtual crowds namely, Positive, Negative, Neutral, and a Mix condition. The Mix group is defined by a combination of Positive, Negative and Neutral emotional expressive characters. Depending on the specific condition, the virtual humans showed specific verbal and non-verbal behaviors. During the experiment we collected objective measures such as skin electrodermal activity, total time in the simulation, the number of interactions with the agents and performance measures. The subjective measures were the differential emotional survey (DES), and a user experience survey. We reported our findings with an in-depth analysis.