Towards using Virtual Reality for Replicating HRI Studies

As a first step into utilizing Virtual Reality (VR) for Human-Robot interaction(HRI) studies we attempted to replicate a study from Kahn et al., which was interested in peoples' secret keeping behaviour with regards to robotic tour guides compared to human tour guides. Some changes had to be made to the original study but the essence of the experiment was maintained. Results suggest that there are many differences in how the participants in this study viewed the various robot behaviours when compared to how participants viewed the guides in the original study. As such no conclusive statements can be made about the overall suitability of VR as a platform for conducting HRI studies.