2016/07/29 by Francesco Alderisio, Maria Lombardi, Alderisio, Francesco +5
Engineering · Psychology · Computer Science · #Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics #Action Observation and Synchronization #Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1608.04652
Movement coordination in human ensembles has been studied little in the\ncurrent literature. In the existing experimental works, situations where all\nsubjects are connected with each other through direct visual and auditory\ncoupling, and social interaction affects their coordination, have been\ninvestigated. Here, we study coordination in human ensembles via a novel\ncomputer-based set-up that enables individuals to coordinate each other's\nmotion from a distance so as to minimize the influence of social interaction.\nThe proposed platform makes it possible to implement different visual\ninteraction patterns among the players, so that participants take into\nconsideration the motion of a designated subset of the others. This allows the\nevaluation of the exclusive effects on coordination of the structure of\ninterconnections among the players and their own dynamics. Our set-up enables\nalso the deployment of virtual players to investigate dyadic interaction\nbetween a human and a virtual agent, as well as group synchronization in mixed\nteams of human and virtual agents. We use this novel set-up to study\ncoordination both in dyads and in groups over different structures of\ninterconnections, with and without virtual agents. We find that, in dual\ninteraction, virtual players manage to interact with participants in a\nhuman-like fashion, thus confirming findings in previous work. We also observe\nthat, in group interaction, the level of coordination among humans in the\nabsence of direct visual and auditory coupling depends on the structure of\ninterconnections among participants. This confirms, as recently suggested in\nthe literature, that different coordination levels are achieved over diverse\nvisual pairings in the presence and in the absence of social interaction. We\npresent preliminary experimental results on the effect on group coordination of\ndeploying virtual computer agents in the human ensemble.\n