I feel a moving crowd surrounds me: Exploring tactile feedback during immersive walking in a virtual crowd

The aim of our study was to investigate whether different tactile feedback conditions could affect the behavior of participants who were instructed to walk within a virtual reality environment surrounded by a virtual crowd of people. A road crossing scenario that takes place in a virtual metropolitan city was developed for this study. Participants were asked to walk toward the opposite sidewalk while wearing a tactile vest. At each road crossing, one of several tactile feedback conditions was generated, including No Tactile, Side Tactile, Back Tactile, Front Tactile, Accurate Tactile, and Random Tactile. During the virtual road crossing, the movement of the participants was captured, and movement-related measurements were extracted and analyzed to evaluate the effects of tactile feedback on the participant's movement behavior. Additional data were collected through the distribution of a questionnaire to consider self-reported ratings of the experimental conditions. The results revealed that tactile feedback conditions had significant effects on movement behavior, while the participants' ratings also indicated that they were affected by the tactile feedback conditions. We found that when the participants were immersed in a high-density crowd simulation, they became sensitive to tactile feedback. However, they were not able to distinguish between the accurate feedback and the random feedback.