Rome (Italy), 23 July 2026 - How close do we stand to other people during a social interaction? The distance we maintain between our body and that of another person—known as interpersonal distance—is a fundamental aspect of everyday life. It influences our sense of comfort, safety, intimacy, and our tendency to approach or avoid others. This distance can vary depending on the context, the characteristics of the other person, our emotional state, and our personal and social background.
A new study carried out by researchers from Sapienza University, the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), Ernst & Young (EY), and IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia used immersive virtual reality to investigate how Italian and Japanese participants regulate interpersonal distance when interacting with virtual agents displaying either Asian or Caucasian facial features. The research was conducted "in the wild," meaning in real public settings, with participants recruited and tested at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, and Maker Faire Rome, Italy.
The study, coordinated by Salvatore Maria Aglioti , researcher at Sapienza University and the Italian Institute of Technology, with Matteo Lisi as first author, has been published recently in Computers in Human Behavior as part of the Special Issue "Immersive Technologies and Intergroup Relations: Advances, Challenges, and Future Directions."
Unlike many previous studies conducted exclusively in laboratory settings, this research took place in public environments. This approach made it possible to combine a controlled experimental paradigm, based on portable virtual reality technology, with settings that more closely resemble real-life social interactions.
During the experiment, 184 participants —92 Japanese and 92 Italians—were immersed in a virtual café. In each trial, a virtual agent appeared in front of them, and participants adjusted the agent's position until reaching the distance at which they felt most comfortable. The virtual agents varied in gender and perceived ethnicity, displaying either Asian or Caucasian features. Participants also rated several characteristics of each agent, including attractiveness and trustworthiness, and completed a measure of implicit attitudes.
The results showed that, overall, Japanese participants preferred to maintain greater interpersonal distances than Italian participants. Moreover, regardless of participants' cultural background, virtual agents perceived as more attractive or more trustworthy were positioned significantly closer. These findings suggest that first social impressions influence the regulation of personal space even in virtual environments.
Another key finding concerns the role of implicit attitudes. Participants with a stronger pro-Caucasian implicit bias tended to maintain greater distances from Asian virtual agents than from Caucasian ones. This suggests that automatic social evaluations can also be reflected in spatial behaviours measured in virtual reality.
"With this study, we wanted to test whether virtual reality could be used not only as a controlled simulation, but also as a portable tool for measuring social behaviour in public settings," says Matteo Lisi . "The possibility of standardizing the appearance and behaviour of virtual agents," adds Althea Frisanco , IIT researcher, "allows us to study interpersonal distance with high precision while reducing many of the variables that are difficult to control during face-to-face interactions."
The study contributes to the growing body of research exploring the use of virtual reality to investigate social and intergroup relationships. Virtual environments make it possible to create realistic yet highly controlled situations in which researchers can observe how people regulate their behaviour in the presence of other individuals or social agents. This is particularly relevant at a time when virtual spaces and immersive interactions are becoming increasingly widespread.
Overall, Salvatore Maria Aglioti concludes, the findings demonstrate the potential of immersive virtual reality as a valuable tool for studying proxemics, that is the way people regulate space during social interactions, and for understanding how cultural differences, first impressions, and implicit attitudes contribute to shaping interpersonal behaviour, even in digital environments.
Computers in Human Behavior
Observational study
People
Virtual proxemics “in the wild”: a cross-cultural comparison between Japanese and Italian adults recruited at public fairs
26-Jun-2026