Personal Space Augmented Reality Tool

In this work, we present a new psychometric tool for modelling and analysing social interactions. We focus on the concept of interpersonal spaces which are the distances unconsciously established by people between them. The measure of these distances can give us a hint on how people know each other. Our main goal was to create a tool to simplify experimentation in this area of research within social sciences. The system we propose can help to analyse and model personal spaces using computer vision. It is an augmented reality viewer that can, in real time and in 3D, model social spaces around users in a scene using computer graphics. For the computer vision part, we base our work on the new Microsoft’s 3D camera, “Kinect”. This new camera allows us to easily determine people position and reconstruct in 3D the scene for modelling purpose. Our tool gives an intuitive representation of the personal spaces and simplifies experimentation in natural setting. The results of these experiments could be use in the future to develop new forms of human computer interface attentive to human relationship and spatial behaviour.