When Distance Doesn't Match: Effects of Incongruent Proximity on Conversational Naturalness and Realism

With the rapid growth of embodied conversational agents, increasingly rich datasets of conversational motion are being created to support multimodal interaction. However, these datasets often capture behaviour without encoding the interpersonal distance at which it occurred, allowing motion to be replayed across different spatial configurations. This raises the question of whether conversational behaviour remains natural and realistic when replayed at spatially congruent versus incongruent distances. In this preliminary work, we investigate this using high-quality motion-captured conversational dyads, replayed across personal, social, and public proxemic zones. Our results show that substantial variations in interpersonal distance influenced perceived naturalness and realism.