Let’s Come Together: Social Navigation Behaviors of Virtual and Real Humans

In this paper, we present a game-like scenario that is based on a model of social group dynamics inspired by theories from the social sciences. The model is augmented by a model of proxemics that simulates the role of distance and spatial orientation in human-human communication. By means of proxemics, a group of human participants may signal other humans whether they welcome new group members to join or not. In this paper, we describe the results of an experiment we conducted to shed light on the question of how humans respond to such cues when shown by virtual humans.