[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-detail-82274-en":3,"doc-seo-82274-105":30,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":91},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"success",{"doc_id":7,"user_id":8,"nickname":9,"user_avatar":10,"doc_module":4,"category_id":11,"category_name":12,"doc_title":13,"doc_description":14,"doc_content":15,"file_id":16,"file_url":17,"file_type":18,"file_size":19,"view_count":20,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":21,"is_downloadable":21,"audit_status":21,"page_count":22,"language":23,"language_code":24,"site_id":25,"html_lang":24,"table_of_contents":26,"faqs":27,"seo_title":13,"seo_description":14,"update_tm":28,"read_time":29},82274,962075114101,"Seraphina","https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/e000253a75eb197efd?x-image-process=image/resize,m_fixed,w_180,h_180&k=1780044092746381165",8,"Research & Report","Validating Virtual Reality for Studying Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction in Socially Aware Robot Navigation","Virtual Reality (VR) enables flexible, controllable study of human-robot interaction in socially aware navigation, yet its ability to preserve real-world multimodal interaction dynamics remains insufficiently established. This work introduces a VR prototype and evaluates its suitability for studying multimodal HRI in socially aware robot navigation. A within-subjects study (N=21) compared participants interacting with a PR2 robot in a motion-capture arena versus an immersive VR replica across orthogonal crossing and pass-by scenarios. Results assess perceived social awareness, interaction comfort, and behavioral trajectories and head-orientation data, showing strong consistency between VR and real-world observations.","arXiv :2607 .09261v1 [ cs .RO] 10 Jul 2026  \nValidating Virtual Reality for Studying Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction in Socially Aware Robot Navigation  \nHariharan Arunachalam 1[0009−0009−9257−4709], Phani Teja Singamaneni2[0000−0003−4513−8954], and Rachid Alami 1[0000−0002−9558−8163]  \n1 LAAS-CNRS, Universite de Toulouse, France  \n[harunachal@laas.fr](harunachal@laas.fr) , [rachid.alami@laas.fr](rachid.alami@laas.fr)  \n2 Inria Nancy, France  \n[phani-teja.singamaneni@inria.fr](phani-teja.singamaneni@inria.fr)  \nAbstract. Virtual Reality (VR) offers a flexible and controllable platform for studying human-robot interaction. Prior work has explored VR for socially aware robot navigation. However, whether VR captures the multimodal interaction dynamics observed in real-world human-robot co-navigation remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we present a VR prototype and evaluate its suitability for studying multimodal human-robot interaction (HRI) in socially aware navigation. Specifically, we investigate whether VR preserves the multimodal interaction dynamics observed in real-world human-robot co-navigation. We conducted a within-subjects study (N = 21) in which participants interacted with a PR2 mobile manipulator robot in both a motion capture equipped arena and its virtual replica in an immersive VR environment. Two common co-navigation scenarios were examined : orthogonal crossing and pass-by interactions. Participants evaluated the robot’s perceived social awareness and interaction comfort, while trajectory and head-orientation data were analysed to examine behavioral responses during the interaction.  \nOur results show that participants perceive the robot’s socially aware navigation similarly in VR and in the real world. Furthermore, VR captures human interaction behaviors in ways consistent with real-world observations. These findings suggest that VR can be a reliable and flexible platform for studying richer multimodal behaviors in social navigation and HRI.  \nKeywords: Virtual Reality · Multimodal Socially Aware Robot Navigation  \n1 Introduction  \nSocially-aware Robot Navigation (SRN) [26, 20] focuses on planning the motion of robots so that they behave in a socially compliant manner when sharing space with humans. Beyond simple collision avoidance, robots must manage conflicts and interactions in a way that is legible, predictable, and comfortable  \n2 H. Arunachalam et al.  \nfor nearby people. Traditionally, humans in this planning problem are modeled as two-dimensional entities whose behavior is inferred primarily from their motion trajectories [26] . Under this formulation, HRI is largely reduced to geometric reasoning, where humans are treated similar to dynamic obstacles whose future motion must be predicted and avoided.  \nHowever, human social perception relies on a much richer set of cues. People interpret the intentions and behaviors of others through multiple modalities, including body orientation, gaze direction, gestures, interpersonal distance, and contextual information [3] . These signals play an important role in coordinating movements and negotiating shared spaces. As a result, modeling humans solely through two-dimensional motion trajectories provides only a limited representation of the factors that shape human-robot interaction.  \nStudying these multimodal aspects of social navigation in the real world can be challenging [4] due to limited experimental control, safety considerations, and the difficulty of systematically manipulating environmental and interaction variables. Virtual Reality (VR) provides an alternative platform, offering a controllable and reproducible environment in which complex human-robot interactions can be studied while capturing rich behavioral signals [16] and high fidelity data.  \nWhile VR has been successfully used for robotics and HRI experiments, existing VR-based SRN studies primarily focus on planar human trajectories and interaction distances. These approaches ","cbCaimxV9RPBKNcv","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaimxV9RPBKNcv","pdf",3205559,2,1,18,"English","en",105,"# Introduction\n## Socially-aware robot navigation and multimodal cues\n## Research gap and validation approach\n## Contributions and paper organization","[{\"question\":\"What key question does the paper address about VR in socially aware robot navigation?\",\"answer\":\"It investigates whether VR preserves the multimodal interaction dynamics seen in real-world human-robot co-navigation, especially beyond planar trajectories.\"},{\"question\":\"How was the study conducted to compare real-world and VR interactions?\",\"answer\":\"A within-subjects study (N=21) had participants interact with a PR2 mobile manipulator in a motion-capture arena and in an immersive VR replica.\"},{\"question\":\"Which co-navigation scenarios and signals were used for evaluation?\",\"answer\":\"The paper examines orthogonal crossing and pass-by interactions, measuring perceived social awareness and interaction comfort, along with motion trajectories and head-orientation 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key question does the paper address about VR in socially aware robot navigation?","Question",{"text":75,"@type":76},"It investigates whether VR preserves the multimodal interaction dynamics seen in real-world human-robot co-navigation, especially beyond planar trajectories.","Answer",{"name":78,"@type":73,"acceptedAnswer":79},"How was the study conducted to compare real-world and VR interactions?",{"text":80,"@type":76},"A within-subjects study (N=21) had participants interact with a PR2 mobile manipulator in a motion-capture arena and in an immersive VR replica.",{"name":82,"@type":73,"acceptedAnswer":83},"Which co-navigation scenarios and signals were used for evaluation?",{"text":84,"@type":76},"The paper examines orthogonal crossing and pass-by interactions, measuring perceived social awareness and interaction comfort, along with motion trajectories and head-orientation 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