Joint Locomotion with Virtual Agents in Immersive Environments

Many applications in the realm of social virtual reality require reasonable locomotion patterns for their embedded, intelligent virtual agents (VAs). The two main research areas covered in the literature are pure inter-agent-dynamics for crowd simulations and user-agent-dynamics in, e.g., pedestrian scenarios. However, social locomotion, defined as a joint locomotion of a social group consisting of a human user and one to several VAs in the role of accompanying interaction partners, has not been carefully investigated yet. I intend to close this gap by contributing locomotion models for the social group’s VAs. Thereby, I plan to evaluate the effects of the VAs’ locomotion patterns on a user’s perceived degree of immersion, comfort, and social presence.