Received: 29 June 2020 Accepted: 15 July 2020 DOI: 10.1002/cav.1963 SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER I feel a moving crowd surrounds me: Exploring tactile feedback during immersive walking in a virtual crowd Alexandros Koilias 1 Christos Mousas 2 Christos-Nikolaos Anagnostopoulos 1 1 Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Greece 2 Department of Computer Graphics Technology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, Correspondence Christos Mousas, Department of Computer Graphics Technology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907. Email: cmousas@purdue.edu Abstract The aim of our study was to investigate whether different tactile feedback con- ditions could affect the behavior of participants who were instructed to walk within a virtual reality environment surrounded by a virtual crowd of people. A road crossing scenario that takes place in a virtual metropolitan city was devel- oped for this study. Participants were asked to walk toward the opposite sidewalk while wearing a tactile vest. At each road crossing, one of several tactile feedback conditions was generated, including No Tactile, Side Tactile, Back Tactile, Front Tactile, Accurate Tactile, and Random Tactile. During the virtual road crossing, the movement of the participants was captured, and movement-related mea- surements were extracted and analyzed to evaluate the effects of tactile feedback on the participant’s movement behavior. Additional data were collected through the distribution of a questionnaire to consider self-reported ratings of the exper- imental conditions. The results revealed that tactile feedback conditions had significant effects on movement behavior, while the participants’ ratings also indicated that they were affected by the tactile feedback conditions. We found that when the participants were immersed in a high-density crowd simula- tion, they became sensitive to tactile feedback. However, they were not able to distinguish between the accurate feedback and the random feedback. KEYWORDS human–crowd interaction, human movement, self-reported ratings, tactile feedback, virtual crowd 1 INTRODUCTION With the recent growth in the use of virtual reality devices and interfaces, people can experience and immerse themselves in virtual environments that are completely different from the place they are actually located. In addition to the visual information provided to virtual reality (VR) users, which is sent through the head-mounted display that is used to project the virtual content so they have a compelling VR experience, the aural, haptic, proprioceptive, and vestibular systems should also be engaged during the experience. 1,2 However, achieving a compelling experience is not easy because several additional pieces of equipment are necessary. Considering the recent advances in commercial VR tactile feedback devices that have been developed to give users the ability to sense a VR experience, a study on human body contact imposed through a wearable tactile vest was conducted. This study combines the tactile feedback with the ability of the VR headset to track the user’s position and visually place the users within a virtual environment, where they were asked to perform a walking task surrounded by a virtual crowd Comp Anim Virtual Worlds. 2020;31:e1963. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cav © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1 of 16 https://doi.org/10.1002/cav.1963