The Italy Pavilion's auditorium at Expo 2025 Osaka has hosted a big crowd of visitors and experts who attended the event 'Beyond the Real: Understanding Interpersonal Space in VR at the Italy Pavilion'.
The panel discussion focused on a project promoted by EY in cooperation with Rome's La Sapienza University and the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) which aims to investigate how proxemics - the space used by individuals in interpersonal interactions - is influenced by psychological, physical and cultural factors.
Such dynamics are visible in the real world as well as in virtual reality.
The experiment, led by Salvatore Maria Aglioti, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at La Sapienza University, together with Althea Frisanco, an IIT researcher, and Matteo Lisi, a researcher at La Sapienza, explores how the Italy Pavilion's visitors respond to interactions with avatars in different virtual contexts.
"Today we have examined how virtual reality can be an accelerating" factor in science, stressed Giuseppe Perrone, EY partner.
