Non-user Inclusive Design for Maintaining Harmony of Real-Virtual Human Interaction in Augmented Reality

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.