Social wayfinding in virtual reality: Navigational decisions and eye movements in a dynamic environment

Social wayfinding refers to the process of navigating in the presence of other people. Social wayfinding entails a complex series of interrelated decisions, such as how closely to approach people and when to pass them. In this paper we report two virtual reality experiments that investigate social wayfinding in a complex, dynamic task. In these experiments, participants physically walked from one end of a simulated train station waiting room to the other, avoiding static obstacles (e.g., benches, seated and standing people) and dynamic obstacles (two rows of people walking perpendicularly to the participant's path). We model the task as a hierarchical combination of local subgoals (e.g., when and where to pass people) and a global goal (which gate to navigate toward). Although eye movements are difficult to analyze in such a dynamic task, they prove to be particularly revealing about how participants combined these local and global goals efficiently in real time. Overall, the results suggest that participants rapidly deploy a flexible combination of local and global decision strategies to navigate crowded environments efficiently.