Personal Space for Avatar Communication in Real and Virtual Environments

In recent years, the development of the metaverse and avatar robots have led to construct an avatar society, where people communicate with each other using their avatars. Just as psychology has been developed as academic studies for building a better society in the real world, the construction of avatar psychology is necessary to build a better avatar society. This paper addresses the issue of personal space as one of the topics of avatar psychology.Personal space is the space in which people feel uncomfortable when other people exist, and it is important for us to have a suitable personal space for comfortable communication. Personal space is known to change depending on the relationships between people such as family, friends, business associates, and others, personal attributes such as gender and age, and the social and cultural background in which the person grew up. Considering such knowledge about personal space is important to improve work efficiency and realize comfortable communication of users when designing spaces where people gather, such as offices, conference rooms, restaurants, event halls, etc. In contrast, there are few research cases on personal space for avatars in the metaverse, and the most of the current spaces in the metaverse are designed using the knowledge about personal space for humans in the real world. In this study, we aim to build a more comfortable and productive metaverse space or a coexistence workspace with communication robots by considering the knowledge of personal space for various avatars. Specifically, the personal space for a CG avatar in a virtual space and the personal space for an avatar robot in a real space were measured through the experiments and it was compared with the personal space for a human in the real space. In particular, when measuring the personal space in a virtual space, accurate measurement can be performed by observing a real-size avatar model from a first-person perspective using an HMD. In addition, the impressions felt by users when facing a human, an avatar robot, and a CG avatar were evaluated using the SD (Semantic Differential) method.The experimental results showed that the personal space for a CG avatar was slightly larger than the personal space for a physical opponent such as a real human and an avatar robot. This difference is thought to be due to the fact that the impressions of familiarity, security, and emotional richness were smaller for a CG avatar than a real human or an avatar robot. It was also shown that the personal space for a CG avatar changed depending on the character expression and the body size of the avatar. Therefore, it is expected that these results can be used as a guideline for improving comfortable communication and work efficiency when designing communication spaces in the metaverse or designing workspaces where avatar robots exist in the real space.