並走するバーチャルアバタの形態と運動によって生じる歩行速度変調

抄録

Previous research has shown that human walking speed is influenced by visual stimuli in the environment. For example, the speed of optical flow in one’s peripheral vision negatively correlates with his/her walking speed. However, the effect of seeing the other walkers in the peripheral on his/her walking speed is unclear. In this study, we investigate how seeing avatars walking alongside a person affects his/her walking speed. In our experiments, participants wore a head-mounted display and saw three types of virtual avatars walking alongside him/her: whole-body silhouettes of walking persons, point-light biological motions, and spatially scrambled point-light motions. Results show that the walking whole-body silhouettes and the point-light biological motion significantly increased the participants’ walking speed, and a significant interaction between their global translational speed and local motion speed was found to change the participants’ walking speed. These results indicate that we can apply a similar technique to control multiple persons’ walking speed in the real environment.