Influences on the Elicitation of Interpersonal Space with Virtual Humans

The emergence of low cost virtual and augmented reality systems has encouraged the development of immersive training applications for medical, military, and many other fields. Many of the training scenarios for these various fields may require the presentation of realistic interactions with virtual humans. It is thus vital to determine the critical factors of fidelity required in those interactions to elicit naturalistic behavior on the part of trainees. Negative training may occur if trainees are inadvertently influenced to react in ways that are unexpected and unnatural, hindering proper learning and transfer of skills and knowledge back into real world contexts. In this research, we examined whether haptic priming (presenting an illusion of virtual human touch at the beginning of the virtual experience) and different locomotion techniques (either joystick or physical walking) might affect proxemic behavior in human users. The results of our study suggest that locomotion techniques can alter proxemic behavior in significant ways. Haptic priming did not appear to impact proxemic behavior, but did increase rapport and other subjective social measures. The results suggest that designers and developers of immersive training systems should carefully consider the impact of even simple design and fidelity choices on trainee reactions in social interactions.