Communicative Presence in Videocommunications

Abstract

This paper deals with factors affecting Communicative Presence in videocommunications. Communicative Presence is defined as the capacity of a system to transfer mutual communicative signals of interlocutors. The experiment the paper reports on examined the effects of various features of videoconferencing systems in terms of several aspects, such as the conferees' feeling of being individually addressed by non-verbal signals (e.g. eye-contact), the flow of conversation, user satisfaction, and the willingness to use videoconferencing systems. One system feature that was systematically varied was the degree of vertical and horizontal eye-contact angles. In order to reduce the horizontal eye-contact angles for the two test subjects acting as conferees at one site of the experimental set-up, two different images (one per conferee) which were in accordance with the perspectives the conferees would have in a similar face-to-face meeting were displayed (“view-per-person” principle). Another feature that was examined was the spatial resolution of the displayed images. The results showed that large eye-contact angles as well as a low resolution decrease the feeling of Communicative Presence. Within the framework of the experiment, the hypothesis concerning the benefits of a view-per-person representation could not be verified.

Designing social presence of social actors in human computer interaction

“…As far as media variables, presence has been argued to be associated with the number of sensory dimensions and channels presented and engaged [22,24,45], image quality [7], image size [22,25], narrative quality [38], production techniques [51], sound fidelity [39], and the presence of other people in the medium [17]. As far as user variables, researchers argue that presence is positively related to willingness to suspend disbelief [23,24], prior exposure to media [24], gender [21,24,25], and mood, especially sensationseeking mood [1].…”

Why Presence Occurs: Evolutionary Psychology, Media Equation, and Presence

“…• Consistency of multimodal sensory information (Held & Durlach, 1992) • Equipment comfort and ease of navigation (Barfield & Weghorst, 1993) • Fast response rates to user input (Held & Durlach, 1992) • Image resolution, color quality, clarity of image (Held & Durlach, 1992;Barfield & Weghorst, 1993;Bocker & Muhlbach, 1993) • Image size or field of view (Reeves, Detenber, & Steuer, 1993;Prothero & Hoffman, 1995;Kim & Biocca, 1997;Lombard et al, 2000) • Inclusion of sound in virtual environment (Steuer, 1992;Gilkey & Weisenberger, 1995) • Isolation of real environment (Witmer & Singer, 1998) • Meaningful media content (Hoffman, Prothero, Wells, & Groen, 1998) • Modifiability of environment in virtual environment (Sheridan, 1992) • Number of sensory dimensions and channels presented and engaged (Steuer, 1992;Kim & Biocca, 1997;Lombard & Ditton, 1997) • Scene update rates (Barfield & Hendrix, 1995) Despite the conceptual attention to users' psychological processing, the user factor has either been neglected or simply regarded as a source of random error. As a result, there have been fewer empirical studies reporting the effect of user variables on the feeling of presence.…”

Is seeing believing?

“…Independent of subjective judgments of image quality, people have been shown to exhibit physiological symptoms of stress when presented with a reduced frame rate video signal [6]. In addition, difficulty in the detection of nonverbal cues due to decreased image resolution can lead to confusion in cooperative and competitive tasks [2].…”