Non-user Inclusive Design for Maintaining Harmony of Real-Virtual Human Interaction in Augmented Reality
This addresses harmony and comfort for users and non-users in AR environments, but it is an incremental improvement focused on a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of non-users disrupting interactions between users and Virtual Humans in augmented reality by proposing a method that adjusts the VH's position to avoid conflicts, with evaluation showing it successfully reduces potential conflicts.
Augmented reality enables the illusion of contents such as objects and humans in the virtual world co-existing with users in the real world. However, non-users who are not aware of the presence of the virtual world and dynamically move nearby might either cause a conflict by directly breaking into space where a user is talking to a Virtual Human (VH), or be troubled when try to avoid disturbing the user. To maintain harmony and keep both the user's and non-users' comfort, we propose a method that controls the VH to adjust its own position to avoid such potential conflict. The difficulty to address this problem is that the agent must avoid potential conflict in a natural way to keep the user away from feeling unnatural. Our idea is to endow the VH with three capabilities: anticipating non-users walking around, understanding how to establish and maintain proper formation to adapt to the environment, and planning to avoid conflicts by shifting formation in advance. We develop a non-user inclusive spatial formation model that realizes natural arrangement shift corresponding to the environment based on theoretical sources from literature. We implemented our proposed model into a VH behavior planning system to achieve natural conflict avoidance. Evaluation experiments showed that it successfully reduces potential conflicts caused by non-users.