Figure 2
From: Psychological and physiological evidence for an initial ‘Rough Sketch’ calculation of personal space
Examples of human and virtual ‘intruders’. The examples shown here include real humans (left and middle right rows, a male and female, respectively) and avatars (middle left and right rows) which served as ‘intruders’ in the Stop Distance Procedures and the Distance Range Experiments. Human and virtual intruders were positioned at systematically varied distances. The distance variations were based on a percentage of each subject’s personal space size. For this illustration, the personal space size was arbitrarily set at 75 cm. The avatars displayed here are highly similar in appearance to the human subjects shown, in order to illustrate minimum possible differences in appearance between the humans and avatars that could be achieved. Despite the similarities of these examples, it is easy to distinguish the avatars from the human subjects. In the actual experiment, the humans and avatars viewed by each participant were not necessarily similar in appearance. Also, additional cues made it trivial to distinguish the real versus virtual intruders (e.g., subjects were clearly aware of whether they were wearing VR goggles, or not).
