Let Me Show You Your New Home: Studying the Effect of Proxemic-awareness of Robots on Users’ First Impressions

First impressions play an important part in social interactions, establishing the foundation of a person's opinion about their counterparts. Since interpersonal communication is essentially multimodal, people are judged during first encounters by both their verbal utterances and nonverbal behavior, such as how they utilize eye contact, body distance, and body orientation. In this paper, we argue that robots would provide better user experiences, including being perceived as more likable if they were able to make a good first impression when introduced to a new home. Moreover, we wanted to test if robots can improve their perceived impression by behaving in a proxemic-aware manner; i.e., by following established social norms, which prescribe, for example how far people should position themselves around other objects to improve the facilitation of social interactions. In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted a user study with 16 participants in a virtual reality setting, comparing the impression of two agents being introduced to their new homes by users. We found that the proxemic-aware agent was indeed perceived as significantly better considering multiple constructs, including perceived anthropomorphism and trustworthiness.