How Responsiveness, Group Membership and Gender affect the feeling of Presence in Immersive Virtual Environments Populated with Virtual Crowds

When designing environments in Immersive Virtual Reality, virtual humans are often used to enrich them. In this paper, we research factors arising by the use of virtual crowds that may instigate more user participation in virtual reality scenarios. In particular, we examine whether implementing responsive virtual crowd behaviors toward the participant provides cues that increase the feeling of presence. The second factor we investigate is whether using appearance characteristics to a virtual crowd enable users to not only to identify as being socially related with the virtual characters, but also behave as such in a virtual environment, a factor we refer to as Group membership. We present an experiment in a Virtual Environment (VE) populated with virtual crowd with a violent incident where the user could intervene, aimed to determine how these factors contribute to the enhancement of plausibility and feeling of presence. Our results show that in IVR, virtual crowds with Responsive behavior can increase the feeling of Presence since the user tends to make more interventions when the virtual crowd is responsive towards and when the user is socially related to the incident's victim.