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

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.