Collision Avoidance Affected by Walker's Head Direction in a Virtual Environment

Abstract

We investigated participants' active response to avoid collision with an approaching walker in a virtual environment. The walker was approaching and then changed his direction leftward or rightward at a random timing. The walker's head rotated (yaw) leftward or rightward, or remained straight at 533ms before direction change of walking. Ten participants were asked to avoid collision by moving a mouse laterally to move own viewpoint. We found that participants' collision avoidance behavior was affected by head directions. They moved in the opposite direction to the other walker's head direction when the walker rotated his head. These results suggest that we utilize other people's head direction to avoid collision in active situation as well as static perceptual situation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.