Summary:
Market Scene was inspired by an actual market place environment where any person can walk up to any shopkeeper, or customer, and converse about anything. With the development of VAIF, we were able to allow the user to walk to any shopkeeper, or customer, and imitate a realistic conversation. Simultaneously, Market Scene created an environment where we could study human and Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) proxemic studies.
What is Market Scene?
Market Scene is a VR application used to study the proximity humans displayed to Embodied Conversational Agents as they approached them to interact. Players were given no task but rather simply explained they could interact with shopkeepers around the market. In order to track player proxemics, players had to walk up to each shopkeeper to interact.
My Contribution
As a developer and scene designer, I was tasked with QA testing and immersive design elements. The biggest design element was creating a crowd that mimicked a human-like crowd at a market. I challenged myself to learn Unity's NavMeshAgent tool which allowed any humanoid character to move in any given direction based on the baked mesh. Additionally, with a script I made I could dictate which animation to play while also moving the character towards a given target.
The paper detailing our ECA proxemics findings can be found here.
