Being Part of the Swarm: Experiencing Human-Swarm Interaction with VR and Tangible Robots

A swarm is the coherent behavior that emerges ubiquitously fromsimple interaction rules between self-organized agents. Understand-ing swarms is of utmost importance in many disciplines and jobs,but hard to teach due to the elusive nature of the phenomenon,which requires to observe events at different scales (i.e., from dif-ferent perspectives) and to understand the links between them. Inthis article, we investigate the potential of combining a swarm oftangible, haptic-enabled robots with Virtual Reality, to provide auser with multiple perspectives and interaction modalities on theswarm, ultimately aiming at supporting the learning of emergentbehaviours. The framework we developed relies on Cellulo robotsand Oculus Quest and was preliminarily evaluated in a user studyinvolving 15 participants. Results suggests that the framework ef-fectively allows users to experience the interaction with the swarmunder different perspectives and modalities.