Comparing Human-Robot Proxemics Between Virtual Reality and the Real World

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) is gaining more and more popularity as a research tool in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). To fully deploy the potential of VR and benefit HRI studies, we need to establish the basic understanding of the relationship between the physical, real-world interaction (Live) and VR. This study compared Live and VR HRI with a focus on proxemics, as proxemics preference can reflect comprehensive human intuition, making it suitable to be used to compare Live and VR. To evaluate the influence of different modalities in VR, virtual scenes with different visual familiarity and spatial sound were compared as well. Lab experiments were conducted with a physical Pepper robot and its virtual copy. In both Live and VR, proxemics preferences, the perception of the robot (competence and discomfort) and the feeling of presence were measured and compared. Results suggest that proxemic preferences do not remain consistent in Live and in VR, which could be influenced by the perception of the robot. Therefore, when conducting HRI experiments in VR, the perceptions of the robot need be compared before the experiments. Results also indicate freedom within VR HRI as different VR settings are consistent with each other. ABSTRACTVirtual Reality (VR) is gaining more and more popularity as a research tool in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). To fully deploy the potential of VR and benefit HRI studies, we need to establish the basic understanding of the relationship between the physical, real-world interaction (Live) and VR. This study compared Live and VR HRI with a focus on proxemics, as proxemics preference can reflect comprehensive human intuition, making it suitable to be used to compare Live and VR. To evaluate the influence of different modalities in VR, virtual scenes with different visual familiarity and spatial sound were compared as well. Lab experiments were conducted with a physical Pepper robot and its virtual copy. In both Live and VR, proxemics preferences, the perception of the robot (competence and discomfort) and the feeling of presence were measured and compared. Results suggest that proxemic preferences do not remain consistent in Live and in VR, which could be influenced by the perception of the robot. Therefore, when conducting HRI experiments in VR, the perceptions of the robot need be compared before the experiments. Results also indicate freedom within VR HRI as different VR settings are consistent with each other.

Technical Challenges for Smooth Interaction With Seniors With Dementia: Lessons From Humanitude™

“…For example, before talking with another person, people adjust their position relationships based on personal space (Hall, 1966). Many social robots also consider such position relationships before interacting with people as preconversational interactions (Obaid et al, 2016;Li et al, 2019;Saunderson and Nejat, 2019). Following such concepts, robotics researchers investigated the pre-touch reaction distance around a face between people and reported that the average distance is about 20 cm (Shiomi et al, 2018).…”

SIGVerse: A Cloud-Based VR Platform for Research on Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction

“…Because human perception differs in many aspects between actual reality and VR, we cannot simply replace the experimental environment with VR (Wijnen et al, 2020). Therefore, it is necessary to consider several conditions, such as differences in distance perception (Li et al, 2019), gaze control (Duchowski et al, 2014;Sidenmark and Gellersen, 2019), and visual perception owing to a narrow field of view (Willemsen et al, 2009;Mizuchi and Inamura, 2018).…”

Toward Virtual Reality-based Evaluation of Robot Navigation among People

“…Such comparisons have been done for many different studies: locomotion toward a goal [1,8], collision avoidance [1,5,16,30], personal space [19,28], etc. Also, HRI experiments in VR in [23] explore the bias when the human only is immersed in VR. All these studies show that, while there is some quantitative differences, such as slower walking speed or bigger personal space, humans display similar patterns and behaviors in VR.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a real robot is immersed in VR in order to make it capable of operating in a real or a virtual environment in the same way. In the closest work to our [23], the robot and the human positions are tracked based on HTC vive trackers for them to share their mutual position, the robot is not perceiving the human position through its sensors, and the tracking is a low dimensional one (the posture of the human and of the robot are ignored). The robot has direct access to its externally tracked position, thus not dealing with the robot sensing and processing capacities issues.…”