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.
    "We did it by discussing together with the Japanese audience how cultural differences can determine different consequences in this type of measurement", added Perrone.
    EY, which also managed the virtual Expo at the Italy Pavilion together with Almaviva, was also represented by manager Ivan Perrone.
    Researcher Lisi explained that "we are investigating how people regulate interpersonal space with avatars representing different ethnic groups and how our attitudes and our explicit - as well as unconscious - prejudices influence the perception of the space we have around us".
    The experiment taken to Japan was adapted to the somatic features of Asian and Caucasian people, although reactions between all ethnic groups are being investigated.
    After the first phase of the research, as explained by Frisanco, a second one will follow: "One of the future objectives of this experiment will be to see if, by putting people in someone else's body, for example Caucasians in the body of an Asian person or Asian people in the body of a Caucasian, the way in which we regulate interpersonal space changes".

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