Mutual collision avoidance during walking in real and collaborative virtual environments

In walkable multi-user HMD-based VR immersed users have toavoid colliding with each other while performing tasks or exploring the virtual environment. This paper presents an experiment inwhich we compare mutual collision avoidance behaviour of pairsof users walking in the matched real and virtual environments. Togeneralize our study, we investigate two types of multi-user VRsetup: one in which both users share a common tracking space (colocated condition) and one where they move in two separate trackingspaces while sharing a common virtual space (distributed condition). Our results indicated signifcant differences in locomotortrajectories of participants between the real and virtual conditions.Precisely, we observed an increase in the clearance distance andthe median path curvature and a decrease in the walking speedwhen participants performed the test in VR in the colocated condition. Moreover, we found effects of pre-conditioning between thecolocated and distributed scenarios.