Performing Human-Robot Interaction User Studies in Virtual Reality *

This study investigated whether virtual reality could be used as platform for conducting human-robot interaction user studies. It was investigated whether user studies performed in virtual reality elicited realistic responses from participants. To answer this question, a real world study was replicated as closely as possible in virtual reality, where a robot tour guide asked participants to keep a secret. The experiment consisted of a virtual museum tour where the robot acted as the tour guide while displaying either social or non-social behaviour.The measurements taken in this study were the objective measurement whether the participants kept the robot’s secret or not. Questionnaires were taken to investigate participants’ perception of the robot and its feelings, as well as their experienced level of presence and their tendency to become immersed in the virtual environment. Results show that the participants responded differently in the virtual reality study when compared to the original real world study, where the secret was kept more often for the non-social robot, but less often for the social robot. In both the original and replicated study a strong, positive correlation was found between participants’ perception of the robot as a social being and their tendency to keep the robot’s secret.These inconclusive findings, some changes that were required for the virtual environment compared to the original study, and different participant demographics indicate that more work is needed to determine whether virtual reality can be used as a tool to conduct human-robot interaction experiments.