TY - GEN N2 - 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. ID - discovery10132229 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/VR50410.2021.00022 PB - IEEE CY - Lisboa, Portugal A1 - Medeiros, D A1 - Anjos, RD A1 - Pantidi, N A1 - Huang, K A1 - Sousa, M A1 - Anslow, C A1 - Jorge, J TI - Promoting reality awareness in virtual reality through proxemics AV - public SP - 21 Y1 - 2021/03/01/ EP - 30 N1 - This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher?s terms and conditions. ER -