Locomotion in Response of Static Pedestrians in a Mixed Reality Environment

As the development of mixed reality technology, overlaying virtual objects onto the real environment using HMD has become a new and promising research tool, especially for pedestrian behavior and interaction. However, the literature is not yet conclusive on the extent to which pedestrians are willing to “bypass” human-like projections in mixed reality HMDs. In this paper, we explore the avoidance behaviors of participants in mixed reality environments. We analyzed the locomotor circumvention strategies of participants in bypassing either real or virtual obstructors to reach a target located 12 m away. We considered different velocity conditions to evaluate the feasibility of the system in different scenarios. Results showed that under different velocities, the real/virtual interferer exhibited slower movement speed, larger maximum lateral displacement, and larger minimum distance, but the effects were not significant. Additionally, our findings indicate that mixed reality HMDs can be an effective tool for studying pedestrian movement behavior. We discussed the application prospects of mixed reality-based LVC simulation systems in crowd research.