Social rather than physical crowding reduces the required interpersonal distance in virtual environments

Area of Science:

• Virtual Reality (VR) and Human-Computer Interaction
• Social Psychology and Proxemics

Background:

• Interpersonal distance is vital for social interactions.
• The impact of virtual environments on personal space is an emerging research area.
• Understanding how virtual crowdedness affects interpersonal distance is key for VR social applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether and how crowded virtual scenes alter human-required interpersonal distance.
• To differentiate the effects of social versus physical crowdedness on personal space in VR.
• To model the relationship between environmental crowdedness and interpersonal distance in virtual settings.

Main Methods:

• Manipulation of crowd density in virtual environments.
• Utilizing the stop-distance paradigm to measure interpersonal distance.
• Analysis of the correlation between crowd density (social and physical, local and global) and measured distances.

Main Results:

• Required interpersonal distance decreased with increased social crowdedness, but not physical crowdedness.
• The reduction in interpersonal distance correlated with globally averaged crowd density, not local density.
• The observed effect was not attributable to imitation of other virtual humans.

Conclusions:

• Social crowdedness in VR significantly reduces required interpersonal distance.
• Global crowd density is a more influential factor than local density in virtual environments.
• Findings offer valuable insights for designing more intuitive and comfortable virtual humans and social VR experiences.