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Navigating the Virtual Gaze: Social Anxiety's Role in VR Proxemics

Mello, Beatriz; Welsch, Robin; Verbokkem, Marissa Christien; Knierim, Pascal; Dechant, Martin Johannes; (2024) Navigating the Virtual Gaze: Social Anxiety's Role in VR Proxemics. In: Mueller, Florian Floyd and Kyburz, Penny and Williamson, Julie R and Sas, Corina and Wilson, Max L and Toups Dugas, Phoebe and Shklovski, Irina, (eds.) CHI '24: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (pp. p. 598). ACM: New York, NY, USA. Green open access

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Abstract

For individuals with Social Anxiety (SA), interacting with others can be a challenging experience, a concern that extends into the virtual world. While technology has made significant strides in creating more realistic virtual human agents (VHA), the interplay of gaze and interpersonal distance when interacting with VHAs is often neglected. This paper investigates the effect of dynamic and static Gaze animations in VHAs on interpersonal distance and their relation to SA. A Bayesian analysis shows that static centered and dynamic centering gaze led participants to stand closer to VHAs than static averted and dynamic averting gaze, respectively. In the static gaze conditions, this pattern was found to be reversed in SA: participants with higher SA kept larger distances for static-centered gaze than for averted gaze VHAs. These findings update theory, elucidate how nuanced interactions with VHAs must be designed, and offer renewed guidelines for pleasant VHA interaction design.

Type: Proceedings paper
Title: Navigating the Virtual Gaze: Social Anxiety's Role in VR Proxemics
Event: CHI '24: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
ISBN-13: 9798400703300
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1145/3613904.3642359
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642359
Language: English
Additional information: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Clinical, Edu and Hlth Psychology
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10194659
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