Controlling virtual body size to reduce discomfort caused by inappropriate interpersonal distance
Masaki Maeda, Tomu Tominaga, Yoshinori Hijikata, Nobuchika Sakata · 2016
Maintaining personal space is important for person to lead a comfortable social life because an inappropriate interpersonal distance often renders discomfort; however, constantly maintaining an appropriate interpersonal distance is difficult. Controlling the visual distance---rather than the physical distance---solves this problem. Therefore, we propose an interpersonal distance control method with a video see-through system, consisting of a head-mounted display and an RGB-D camera. The system controls interpersonal distance by using simple image processing to change the size of persons in the head-mounted display view. To confirm the effectiveness of this method, we conducted experiments that proved that a reduction in virtual body size of persons in the user view reduced discomfort felt by a user. This means that even the prototype system with simple image processing, can reduce discomfort caused by inappropriate interpersonal distance.