Personal space in a virtual community

Abstract

This paper explores whether the societal norm of personal space influences behaviour during interaction and communication in a virtual environment. An online virtual world was explored using a participatory-observer approach over a period of 3 months. The results parallel personal space and physical distance literature: personal space exists; influences behaviour; produces discomfort and possible flight when violated. Future research should explore whether these results indicate identification with one's avatar or another influence.

The social life of small graphical chat spaces

“…Such quantitative analyses are distinct from ethnographic studies, which take the form of direct observation of participant behavior and activity in the virtual space. While ethnographic studies provide valuable information about the content and meaning of social relationships, they have significant limitations [1,7]. Direct observation is labor intensive, misses many forms of interaction and patterns that are difficult to observe from a first person view, is subject to the biases of the observer, and often lacks broad context or duration.…”

“…Graphical chats attempt to address these limitations by introducing surrogate representations for physical bodies and spaces [9,7]. While a number of graphical chat systems have been created, little is known about the nature of social interaction in publicly accessible spaces [8, 10,13] Pem~ission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the lull citation on the first page.…”

See-through techniques for referential awareness in collaborative virtual reality

“…Even though those do not feature intimate sensations like touch or olfaction, it has been observed, that people tend to respect the private space around avatars as if those were real people (Friedman et al, 2007;Jeffrey, 1998;Bailenson et al, 2003;Wilcox et al, 2006). Wilcox et al (2006) could even measure the discomfort of people when being confronted with an avatar intruding their personal distance zone-although at a lower level as compared to facing real people.…”