People regulate comfort and intimacy of everyday social interactions by adjusting interpersonal distance-the physical space between themselves and others. While research has highlighted the role of cultural norms in shaping interpersonal distance, their modulation during intergroup encounters remains underexplored. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) offers a powerful platform for simulating intergroup encounters by enabling embodied, repeatable interactions while controlling the appearance and behaviours of social targets. In this study, we capitalized on portable IVR that enables data collection “in the wild”, to examine how group membership influences interpersonal distance in Japanese and Italian people, often characterized as non-contact and contact cultures, respectively. One hundred eighty-four participants were immersed in a virtual reality scenario and asked to adjust their preferred interpersonal distance from Asian and Caucasian virtual agents. Participants also reported explicit attitudes toward ingroup and outgroup members and completed a Brief Implicit Association Test. Japanese participants preferred larger interpersonal distances than Italian participants. Higher perceived attractiveness and trustworthiness predicted shorter preferred distances, and these effects were consistent across samples. Moreover, stronger pro-Caucasian implicit bias was associated with maintaining a greater distance from Asian (vs. Caucasian) agents. These findings show that differences in proxemic behavior between Japanese and Italian participants, together with implicit bias, may shape interpersonal spacing in virtual environments, with potential implications for intergroup relations in immersive social interactions that can be foreseen to happen in the near future.