Since past studies on haptic and visual communication have tended to be isolated from each other, it has remained unclear whether a touch channel can still enrich mediated communication where video and audio channels are already available. To clarify this, we analyzed remote handshaking in which a robot hand that was attached just under a videoconferencing terminal's display moved according to the opening and closing motion of a conversation partner's hand. Combining touch and video channels raises a question as to whether the partner's action of touching a haptic device should be visible to the user. If it can be invisible, the action may be unnecessary, and a unilaterally controlled device may be enough to establish an effective touch channel. Our analysis revealed that the feeling of being close to the partner can be enhanced by mutual touch in which the partner's action needs to occur but should be invisible.
This paper shows that the augmentation of a remote person's positional movement enhances social telepresence. There are three possible ways of representing a remote person's movement toward the user in visual communication: a) the remote person's movement toward the remote camera, b) the remote camera's zooming in to enlarge the remote person's picture, and c) a forward movement of the display that is displaying the remote person. We conducted an experiment to see the relationship among these three ways and the effects of a remote camera's zooming and a display's movement on social telepresence. In the experiment, we observed that the remote person's movement lowered the reality of conversations, and the remote camera's zooming lowered the visual quality. However, social telepresence was enhanced when both the person's movement and the camera's zooming occurred simultaneously. We also observed that a 6-centimeter movement of the display enhanced social telepresence, whether the remote person moved or not.
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