{"ID":2845059,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05683","arxiv_id":"2511.05683","title":"Exploring Immersive Social-Physical Interaction with Virtual Characters through Coordinated Robotic Encountered-Type Contact","abstract":"This work presents novel robot-mediated immersive experiences enabled by an encountered-type haptic display (ETHD) that introduces direct physical contact in virtual environments. We focus on social-physical interactions, a class of interaction associated with meaningful human outcomes in prior human-robot interaction (HRI) research. We explore the implementation of this interaction paradigm in immersive virtual environments through an object handover, fist bump, and high five with a virtual character. Extending this HRI paradigm into immersive environments enables the study of how physically grounded robotic contact and virtual augmentation jointly shape these novel social-physical interaction experiences. To support this investigation, we introduce ETHOS (Encountered-Type Haptics for On-demand Social interaction), an experimental platform integrating a torque-controlled manipulator and interchangeable props with a headset-mediated virtual experience. ETHOS enables co-located physical interaction through marker-based physical-virtual registration while concealing the robot behind the virtual environment, decoupling contact from visible robot embodiment. Both technical characterization, through spatial alignment and interaction latency tests, and experiential evaluation, through a 55 participant user study, were completed. Overall, the findings demonstrate the feasibility and experiential value of robot-mediated social-physical interaction in VR and motivate further development of dynamic encountered-type approaches for immersive HRI.","short_abstract":"This work presents novel robot-mediated immersive experiences enabled by an encountered-type haptic display (ETHD) that introduces direct physical contact in virtual environments. We focus on social-physical interactions, a class of interaction associated with meaningful human outcomes in prior human-robot interaction...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05683","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05683v2","authors":"[\"Eric Godden\",\"Jacquie Groenewegen\",\"Michael Wheeler\",\"Matthew K. X. J. Pan\"]","published":"2025-11-07T20:04:20Z","proceeding":"cs.HC","tasks":"[\"cs.HC\",\"cs.RO\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}