Effects of Rendering Styles of a Virtual Character on Avoidance Movement Behavior.

Avoidance movements between humans performing locomotive tasks and virtual characters represent typical interactions in immersive virtual environments. When performing these avoidance maneuvers, decisions are based on several factors, including self-presence and the perception of other virtual individuals. However, the impact of visual information on collision-free interactions is not yet fully understood. In this study, we aim to manipulate how the appearance of virtual characters is represented using five different rendering styles (realistic, toon, creepy, scary, and robot) to understand how alternate appearances could potentially affect the avoidance movement behavior of participants. To gather avoidance behavior data, 24 healthy participants performed a two-trial locomotive task toward a target in a virtual environment. Our results indicated that eerie rendering styles affected trajectory length, duration, speed, minimum distance, and side-by-side distance measurements. Additionally, most participants maintained a minimum distance behind the virtual characters and avoided them by keeping to their left side in all examined conditions. We posit that the presented findings contribute toward a fuller understanding of the effects of the appearance of virtual characters on avoidance movement behavior in room-scale virtual environments.