Co-existing With a Drone: Using Virtual Reality to Investigate the Effect of the Drone’s Height and Cover Story on Proxemic Behaviours

Bretin, R. , Cross, E. and Khamis, M. (2022) Co-existing With a Drone: Using Virtual Reality to Investigate the Effect of the Drone’s Height and Cover Story on Proxemic Behaviours. In: 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22), New Orleans, LA, USA, 30 Apr - 05 May 2022, p. 377. ISBN 9781450391566 (doi: 10.1145/3491101.3519750)

Abstract

While a growing body of literature has begun to examine proxemics in light of human–robot interactions, it is unclear how insights gained from human–human or human–robot interaction (HRI) apply during human–drone interactions (HDI). Understanding why and how people locate themselves around drones is thus critical to ensure drones are socially acceptable. In this paper, we present a proxemic user study (N=45) in virtual reality focusing on 1) the impact of the drone’s height and 2) the type of cover story used to introduce the drone (framing) on participants’ proxemic preferences. We found that the flying height has a statistically significant effect on the preferred interpersonal distance, whereas no evidence was found related to how the drone was framed. While results also highlight the value of using Virtual Reality for HDI experiments, further research must be carried out to investigate how these findings translate from the virtual to the real world.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Khamis, Dr Mohamed and Cross, Professor Emily and Bretin, Robin
• Authors: Bretin, R., Cross, E., and Khamis, M.
• College/School: College of Medical Veterinary and Life Sciences > School of Psychology & Neuroscience; College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• ISBN: 9781450391566
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2022 The Authors
• First Published: First published in 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22): 377
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the publisher copyright policy

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• Organisation

Project Code	Award No	Project Name	Principal Investigator	Funder's Name	Funder Ref	Lead Dept
303764		EPSRC CDT - Socially Intelligent Artificial Agents	Alessandro Vinciarelli	Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)	EP/S02266X/1	Computing Science