Jeffrey, P.: Personal space in a virtual community. In: Carat, C.M., Lund, A. (eds.). Proceedings summary of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 98), April 18-23 1998, Los Angeles. New York, NY: ACM, 1998, 347-348. Student Poster.
This short study focuses on personal space, i.e. “an invisible area surrounding an individual which functions as a buffered comfort zone during interpersonal interaction”.
Jeffrey shows that personal space coined by Hall (see The Hidden dimesion for instance) also exists in virtual environment (like Active World). Personal space influences behaviour within a virtual world. Spatial invasions produced anxiety-arousing behaviour with attempts to re-establish a preferred physical distance similar to physical world observations.
-> Personal Space affects how people interact and navigate in virtual environment