Go together: providing nonverbal awareness cues to enhance co-located sensation in remote communication

Abstract

Nowadays, people are easy to have a remote conferencing in different scenarios. However, the potential of mobile video communication has yet to be fully exploited. In our research, we explore providing multiple nonverbal awareness cues to create deeper empathy or understanding between users in the telecommunication. We present our design for the use of remote communication between two geographically separated users. This system provides mutual nonverbal communication cues including independent viewpoint and gesture cue to support natural human-to-human interactions. Using our setups, two users are able to perform multiple joint activities including talking, looking and gesturing together. Finally, users can share co-located sensation and feel themselves “go together” side-by-side in the same place. We performed a evaluation to explore our system’s usability and how multiple awareness cues affect the remote communication. It consists of two experiments: an asymmetric work in which an indoor helper instructed a walking worker and a symmetric collaboration in a more realistic scenario. The positive results show that our design could significantly improve the human-to-human interactions and enhance co-located sensation.

A systematic review of physical–digital play technology and developmentally relevant child behaviour

“…that facilitating joint attention), least during the no-gaze condition, with semi-ideal gaze in between. This is very relevant because non-verbal cues are facilitators of clarity of communication [158] and, therefore, collaboration.…”

Intelligent video interview agent used to predict communication skill and perceived personality traits

“…Social signaling theory [4] implies that a job candidate can demonstrate his/her past behavior in terms of interpersonal communication skills, which indicates that he or she possesses nonverbal communication skills as well as verbal communication skills because nonverbal signals have more influence than verbal signals during human interaction [25], including gesture and postures, face and eye movement, and vocal behavior [26]. According to Brunswik's Lens Model [27], people observe and interpret nonverbal messages during an interaction in addition to verbal messages [28].…”

Social VR: A New Medium for Remote Communication and Collaboration

“…There is a growing need for efective remote communication, which has many positive societal impacts, such as reducing environmental pollution and travel costs, supporting rich collaboration by remotely connecting talented people. Video conferencing tools, such as Zoom 1 and Google Hangouts 2 , are low-cost, allow multiple users to have conversations at the same time, and provide face-to-face-like experiences compared to audio-only phone calls [8,12]. Some high-end video conferencing systems such as HP Halo and Cisco Telepresence are designed to link two physically separated rooms through wallsize screens, high-fdelity audio and video, which enable users to feel co-present in a single conference room [2,23].…”