As social VR grows in popularity, understanding how to optimise interactions becomes increasingly important. Interpersonal distance-the physical space people maintain between each other-is a key aspect of user experience. Previous work in psychology has shown that breaches of personal space cause stress and discomfort. Thus, effectively managing this distance is crucial in social VR, where social interactions are frequent. Teleportation, a commonly used locomotion method in these environments, involves distinct cognitive processes and requires users to rely on their ability to estimate distance. Despite its widespread use, the effect of teleportation on proximity remains unexplored. To investigate this, we measured the interpersonal distance of 70 participants during interactions with embodied conversational agents, comparing teleportation to natural walking. Our findings revealed that participants maintained closer proximity from the agents during teleportation. Female participants kept greater distances from the agents than male participants, and natural walking was associated with higher agency and body ownership, though co-presence remained unchanged. We propose that differences in spatial perception and spatial cognitive load contribute to reduced interpersonal distance with teleportation. These findings emphasise that proximity should be a key consideration when selecting locomotion methods in social VR, highlighting the need for further research on how locomotion impacts spatial perception and social dynamics in virtual environments.

Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a promising technology for remote teamwork; it allows individuals to collaborate in real-time via virtual avatars that convey body language and other nonverbal cues not available via traditional communication mechanisms. However, there is not much known about how the characteristics of these avatars affect the social interactions taking place in these environments. To bridge this gap, we investigate how avatar clothing influences group dynamics during team collaboration in VR. Particularly, we observe the difference between team dynamics when groups are dressed formally and casually. We asked groups of participants to report on their personality, complete two decision-making tasks while wearing different clothing, and report on their perceptions of work group inclusion and entitativity afterwards. We found that clothing had no influence on inclusion and entitativity, but personality did.

Consumer level virtual experiences almost always occur when physical space is limited, either by the constraints of an indoor space or of a tracked area. This observation coupled with the need for movement through large virtual spaces has resulted in a proliferation of research into locomotion interfaces that decouples movement through the virtual environment from movement in the real world. While many locomotion interfaces support movement of some kind in the real world, some do not. This paper examines the effect of the amount of physical space used in the real world on one popular locomotion interface, resetting, when compared to a locomotion interface that requires minimal physical space, walking in place. The metric used to compare the two locomotion interfaces was navigation performance, specifically, the acquisition of survey knowledge. We find that, while there are trade-offs between the two methods, walking in place is preferable in small spaces.

In this paper, we examine how embodiment and manipulation of a self-avatar's dimensions - specifically the arm length - affect users' judgments of the personal space around them in an immersive virtual environment. In the real world, personal space is the immediate space around the body in which physical interactions are possible. Personal space is increasingly studied in virtual environments because of its importance to social interactions. Here, we specifically look at two components of personal space, interpersonal and peripersonal space, and how they are affected by embodiment and the sizing of a self-avatar. We manipulated embodiment, hypothesizing that higher levels of embodiment will result in larger measures of interpersonal space and smaller measures of peripersonal space. Likewise, we manipulated the arm length of a self-avatar, hypothesizing that while interpersonal space would change with changing arm length, peripersonal space would not. We found that the representation of both interpersonal and peripersonal space change when the user experiences differing levels of embodiment in accordance with our hypotheses, and that only interpersonal space was sensitive to changes in the dimensions of a self-avatar's arms. These findings provide increased understanding of the role of embodiment and self-avatars in the regulation of personal space, and provide foundations for improved design of social interaction in virtual environments.

Mixed reality is increasingly being used for training, especially for tasks that are difficult for humans to perform such as far distance perception. Although there has been much prior work on the perception of distance in mixed reality, the majority of the work has focused on distances ranging up to about 30 meters. The little work that has investigated distance perception beyond 30 meters has been mixed in terms of whether people tend to over- or underestimate distances in this range. In the current study, we investigated the perception of distances ranging from 25-500 meters in a fully mediated outdoor environment using the ZED Mini and HTC Vive Pro. To our knowledge, no work has examined distance perception to this range in mixed reality. Participants in the study verbally estimated the distances to a variety of objects. Distances were overestimated from 25-200 meters but underestimated from 300-500 meters. Overall, far distance perception in mixed reality may be biased in different directions depending on the range of distances, suggesting a need for future research in this area to support training of far distance perception.

Navigation and wayfinding are often accomplished collectively, with groups of people. Yet most studies of navigation and wayfinding behavior, and of the acquisition of spatial knowledge more generally, focus on the individual. In this paper we extend the investigation of these topics to dyads. In particular, we focus on how well straight-line distances and directions between objects (survey knowledge) were learned by individuals and by the same individuals when comprising a dyad. Our experiment was carried out in a shared virtual environment and we report on the technical issues in conducting such a collaborative experiment in a shared virtual environment, such as the choice of locomotion mode and the provision of full-body self-avatars. Our findings indicate that dyads outperform individuals in their acquisition of survey knowledge.

In this paper we examine the extent of functional reaching space, or peripersonal space, in immersive three-dimensional virtual reality. In the real world a person’s peripersonal space boundaries can be altered by factors in the environment and by social context. We completed two studies with visual and tactile stimuli to determine peripersonal space boundaries. These studies investigated whether peripersonal space boundaries in an immersive virtual environment are consistent with those in the real world, and could be altered by object and virtual agent interactions. We found that while peripersonal space boundaries were consistent with those in the real world, they were responsive to object and agent interactions. Moreover, while people’s reactions to the objects and agents varied, the peripersonal space boundaries remained consistent. These findings have potential implications for the design of virtual environments.

Navigation, or the means by which people find their way in an environment, depends on the ability to combine information from multiple sources so that properties of an environment, such as the location of a goal, can be estimated. An important source of information for navigation are spatial cues generated by self-motion. Navigation based solely on body-based cues generated by self-motion is called path integration. In virtual reality and video games, many locomotion systems, that is, methods that move users through a virtual environment, can often distort or deprive users of important self-motion cues. There has been much study of this issue, and in this paper, we extend that study in novel directions by assessing the effect of four game-like locomotion interfaces on navigation performance using path integration. The salient features of our locomotion interfaces are that two are primarily continuous, i.e., more like a joystick, and two are primarily discrete, i.e., more like teleportation. Our main findings are that the perspective of path integration, people are able to use all methods, although continuous methods outperform discrete methods.

An essential question in understanding how to develop and build collaborative immersive virtual environments (IVEs) is recognizing how people perform actions together. Many actions in the real world require that people act without prior planning, and these actions are executed quite successfully. In this paper, we study the common action of two people passing through an aperture together in both the real world (Experiment 1) and in a distributed, collaborative IVE (Experiment 2). The aperture's width is varied from too narrow to be passable to so wide as to be easily passable by both participants together simultaneously. We do this in the real world for all possible gender-based pairings. In virtual reality, however, there is potential for the gender of the participant and the gender of the self-avatar to be different. We also investigate the joint action for all possible gender-based pairings in the distributed IVE. Results indicated that, in the real world, social dynamics between gendered pairings emerged; male-male pairings refused to concede to one another until absolutely necessary while other pairings did not. Male-female pairings were most likely to provide ample space to one another during passage. These behaviors seemed not to appear in the IVE, and avatar gender across all pairings generated no significant behavioral differences. In addition, participants tended to require wider gaps to allow for passage in the IVE. These findings establish base knowledge of social dynamics and affordance behaviors within multi-user IVEs.

Underestimation of egocentric distances in immersive virtual environments using various head-mounted displays (HMDs) has been a puzzling topic of research interest for several years. As more commodity-level systems become available to developers, it is important to test the variation of underestimation in each system since reasons for underestimation remain elusive. In this article, we examine several different systems in two experiments and comparatively evaluate how much users underestimate distances in each one. To observe distance estimation behavior, a standard indirect blind walking task was used. An Oculus Rift DK1, weighted Oculus Rift DK1, Oculus Rift DK1 with an artificially restricted field of view, Nvis SX60, Nvis SX111, Oculus Rift DK2, Oculus Rift consumer version (CV1), and HTC Vive were tested. The weighted and restricted field of view HMDs were evaluated to determine the effect of these factors on distance underestimation; the other systems were evaluated because they are popular systems that are widely available. We found that weight and field of view restrictions heightened underestimation in the Rift DK1. Results from these conditions were comparable to the Nvis SX60 and SX111. The Oculus Rift DK1 and CV1 possessed the least amount of distance underestimation, but in general, commodity-level HMDs provided more accurate estimates of distance than the prior generation of HMDs.