Data-driven modeling of group entitativity in virtual environments

A Bera, T Randhavane, E Kubin, H Shaik… - Proceedings of the 24th …, 2018 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 24th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, 2018dl.acm.org
We present a data-driven algorithm to model and predict the socio-emotional impact of
groups on observers. Psychological research finds that highly entitative ie cohesive and
uniform groups induce threat and unease in observers. Our algorithm models realistic
trajectory-level behaviors to classify and map the motion-based entitativity of crowds. This
mapping is based on a statistical scheme that dynamically learns pedestrian behavior and
computes the resultant entitativity induced emotion through group motion characteristics. We …
We present a data-driven algorithm to model and predict the socio-emotional impact of groups on observers. Psychological research finds that highly entitative i.e. cohesive and uniform groups induce threat and unease in observers. Our algorithm models realistic trajectory-level behaviors to classify and map the motion-based entitativity of crowds. This mapping is based on a statistical scheme that dynamically learns pedestrian behavior and computes the resultant entitativity induced emotion through group motion characteristics. We also present a novel interactive multi-agent simulation algorithm to model entitative groups and conduct a VR user study to validate the socio-emotional predictive power of our algorithm. We further show that model-generated high-entitativity groups do induce more negative emotions than low-entitative groups.
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