Shape Shifters: Does Body Shape Change the Perception of Small-Scale Crowd Motions?

The animation of realistic virtual avatars in crowd scenarios is an important element of immersive virtual environments. However, achieving this realism requires attention to multiple factors, such as their visual appearance and motion cues. We investigated how body shape diversity influences the perception of motion clones in virtual crowds. A physics-based model was used to simulate virtual avatars in a small-scale crowd of size twelve. Participants viewed side-by-side video clips of these virtual crowds: one featuring all unique motions (Baseline) and the other containing motion clones (i.e., the same motion used to animate two or more avatars in the crowd). We also varied the levels of body shape and motion diversity. Our findings revealed that body shape diversity did not influence participants' ratings of motion clone detection, and motion variety had a greater impact on their perception of the crowd. Further research is needed to investigate how other visual factors interact with motion in order to enhance the perception of virtual crowd realism.