Social Wayfinding in VR: Navigational Decisions and Eye Movements in a Dynamic Environment

Social wayfinding refers to the process of navigating in the presence of other people. Socialwayfinding entails a complex series of interrelated decisions, such as how closely to approachpeople and when to pass them. In this paper we report two virtual reality (VR) experiments thatinvestigate social wayfinding in a complex, dynamic task. In these experiments, participantsphysically walked from one end of a simulated train station waiting room to the other, avoidingstatic obstacles (e.g., benches, seated and standing people) and dynamic obstacles (two rows ofpeople walking perpendicularly to the participant’s path). We model the task as a hierarchicalcombination of local subgoals (e.g., when and where to pass people) and a global goal (whichgate to navigate toward). Although eye movements are difficult to analyze in such a dynamictask, they prove to be particularly revealing about how participants combined these local andglobal goals efficiently in real time. Overall, the results suggest that adults are experts atsocial navigational tasks, rapidly deploying a flexible combination of local and global decisionstrategies to navigate crowded environments efficiently.