Being Part of the Swarm: Experiencing Human-Swarm Interaction with VR and Tangible Robots

Abstract

A swarm is the coherent behavior that emerges ubiquitously from simple interaction rules between self-organized agents. Understanding swarms is of utmost importance in many disciplines and jobs, but hard to teach due to the elusive nature of the phenomenon, which requires to observe events at different scales (i.e., from different perspectives) and to understand the links between them. In this article, we investigate the potential of combining a swarm of tangible, haptic-enabled robots with Virtual Reality, to provide a user with multiple perspectives and interaction modalities on the swarm, ultimately aiming at supporting the learning of emergent behaviours. The framework we developed relies on Cellulo robots and Oculus Quest and was preliminarily evaluated in a user study involving 15 participants. Results suggests that the framework effectively allows users to experience the interaction with the swarm under different perspectives and modalities.