Preliminary Investigation of Pre-Touch Reaction Distances toward Virtual Agents

This study addresses the pre-touch reaction distance effects in human-agent touch interaction in a VR environment. Past studies on human-agent interaction focused on post-touch situations, i.e., pre-touch situations received less attention, and such pre-touch situation was only investigated with a physical agent, i.e., robot. In this study, we conducted a preliminary data collection to investigate the minimum comfortable distance to virtual agent's touch by using VR application. For this purpose, we prepared two kinds of virtual agents (female and male) to investigate gender effects in touch settings. We analyzed the collected data to investigate about people's perceptions towards a touch from virtual agents, and the results showed similar phenomenon with a physical agent.