Exploring single-line walking in immersive virtual reality

With increasing rates of elderly and obese people in the population, questions are being raised about the validity of inputs used by computer evacuation models to predict the movement of crowds in the built environment. The objective of this study is to examine the movement of individuals in a VR environment. Exploring individual movement in VR (where the individual is exposed to a virtual environment with virtual agents while actually moving alone in the physical environment) is a necessary step on the path to determining if VR is a useful tool to gather new crowd movement data. Specifically, this work presents the results of two experiments that were conducted to measure the correlation between inter-person distance (the distance from a participant to a virtual agent) and walking speed. Results show a positive correlation between walking speed and the inter-person distance for inter-person distances between 1.0 and 1.5 m. Above inter-person distances of 1.5 m, walking speed was not dependent on inter-person distance. An important finding from this work is no observed significant difference in the relationship between walking speed and inter-person distance across both experimental setups – ‘pushing’ or ‘following’ configurations. Finally, this work shows the potential of gathering individual movement data using VR.