Dual-phase user study demonstrates that asynchronous self-interactions preserve realistic proxemics in virtual reality, indicating a scalable framework for modeling social behavior.
Key Points
To investigate whether asynchronous interaction paradigms in virtual reality preserve natural proxemic behaviors during self-dyadic social interactions.
Conducted a virtual reality user study where participants alternated between approaching and being approached by virtual avatars animated from their own prior movement recordings.
Analyzed proxemic outcomes across four interaction variables: participant gender, approach orientation, movement velocity, and perceived attractiveness.
Carried out a second user study evaluating perceived realism, behavioral authenticity, awareness, and interaction distance appropriateness using video comparisons of synchronous and asynchronous interactions.
Asynchronous interactions reproduced standard proxemic patterns, with female participants maintaining larger distances and exhibiting greater reactive displacement than males.
Frontal approach trajectories elicited significantly greater avoidance displacement compared to lateral approaches, with movement velocity actively modulating displacement magnitude and gender effects.
Avatars and movement profiles perceived as less attractive prompted stronger avoidance reactions, confirming that asynchronous paradigms preserve fine-grained social and spatial regularities.