A behavior model for improving realism in a VR team sport
Nisha Jain, Nidhi Mishra, Nadia Magnenat‐Thalmann · 2021
Personality, moods and emotions play a vital role in real-life interactions, especially for team activities like sports. Diverse player personalities lead to distinct emotional reactions impacting game play. One of the major challenges while developing a realistic virtual environment is simulating human-like behaviors and imitations. We aim to improve the believability of virtual players by incorporating personality, moods and emotions for them. We propose a novel framework for a multi-player VR Volleyball game by integrating various behavioral changes during game play. This is achieved by simulating player reactions and rendering changes in the player’s body postures, which are dependent on game environment parameters and scenarios. We showcase visual analysis of individual players’ mood changes during game play to further corroborate the presented VR framework. Incorporating the proposed model, we exhibit the progression and variations in moods for players with different personalities when presented with varied game situations. We conducted a user study with 10 participants, which consisted of seven males and three females. We used two versions of the VR Volleyball game. One version of the game is without any behavioral changes, and the other version included the proposed behavioral model. Our results shows that behavioral changes setting had significantly higher ratings compared to the version with non-behavioral changes setting.