The Impact of a Virtual Agent’s Non-Verbal Emotional Expression on a User’s Personal Space Preferences: Supplemental Material

Virtual-reality-based interactions with virtual agents (VAs) are likely subject to similar influences as human-human interactions. In either real or virtual social interactions, interactants try to maintain their personal space (PS), an ubiquitous, situative, flexible safety zone. Building upon larger PS preferences to humans and VAs with angry facial expressions, we extend the investigations to whole-body emotional expressions. In the paper entitled "The Impact of a Virtual Agent’s Non-Verbal Emotional Expression on a User’s Personal Space Preferences" (presented at IVA 2020, 10.1145/3383652.3423888), we conducted a user study with 66 participants in two immersive settings–HMD and CAVE–who were approached by an either happy, angry, or neutral male VA. This document and the accompanying video provide details on the perception study conducted to select suitable animation datasets expressing the required emotions for our main study.