@inproceedings{discovery10132229, month = {March}, publisher = {IEEE}, title = {Promoting reality awareness in virtual reality through proxemics}, year = {2021}, journal = {Proceedings - 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, VR 2021}, address = {Lisboa, Portugal}, note = {This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.}, pages = {21--30}, booktitle = {2021 IEEE Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR)}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/VR50410.2021.00022}, author = {Medeiros, D and Anjos, RD and Pantidi, N and Huang, K and Sousa, M and Anslow, C and Jorge, J}, abstract = {Head-Mounted Virtual reality (VR) systems provide full-immersive experiences to users and completely isolate them from the outside world, placing them in unsafe situations. Existing research proposed different alert-based solutions to address this. Our work builds on these studies on notification systems for VR environments from a different perspective. We focus on: (i) exploring alert systems to notify VR users about non-immersed bystanders' in socially related, non-critical interaction contexts; (ii) understanding how best to provide awareness of non-immersed bystanders while maintaining presence and immersion within the Virtual Environment(VE). To this end, we developed single and combined alert cues - leveraging proxemics, perception channels, and push/pull approaches and evaluated those via two user studies. Our findings indicate a strong preference towards maintaining immersion and combining audio and visual cues, push and pull notification techniques that evolve dynamically based on proximity.} }