Identity, Form, and Function: Exploring Re-Embodiment for Human-Robot Teaming in Virtual Reality Environments

Robot teammates could re-embody to enhance communication through gaze and gestures in distributed human-robot teaming (HRT) within virtual reality (VR) environments, offering potential benefits for time-critical domains such as emergency response. Yet despite this promise, robot re-embodiment remains underexplored in immersive settings and there is little clarity on how re-embodied robots should be visually designed. In this mixed-methods study, we used Immersive Speculative Enactments to investigate how people make sense of re-embodying robot teammates based on their visual forms in a shared VR environment. In pairs, 42 participants enacted three emergency scenarios with speculative robot teammates (a drone, humanoid firefighter, and fire truck) presented in machine-like, augmented, and human-like embodiments. Thematic analysis of post-session interviews, supported by quantitative data on participants’ VR experiences, showed that sense-making was shaped by robot type, task context, and social norms. Machinelike forms supported recognition of identity and function and were generally preferred; augmented forms blended social and functional cues; and humanlike forms prompted richer social interpretations but sometimes blurred identity and role boundaries. Participants’ future imaginaries of re-embodiment reflected concerns about contextual risk, automation reliability, and emotional labour. Together, these findings provide early insights into how identity, form, and function shape the interpretation of robot teammates in VR, offering guidance for the design of future re-embodiment systems and directions for further research.