Poster: AR-based social presence enhancement in video-chat communication

Video-mediated communication systems attempt to provide users with a channel that could bring out the “feeling” of face-to-face communication. Among the many qualities these systems aim for, a high level of Social Presence is unquestionably a desirable one; however, little effort has been made to improve upon the user´s perception of “presence”. We propose an AR approach to enhance social presence for video-mediated systems by allowing one user to be present in the other user´s video image. By using one extra camera on both sides, our system captures and merges the hand image from/to both sides resulting in an augmented experience where each user can “reach” to the other user´s world. We conducted a preliminary pilot study with 10 participants coupled in 5 pairs in order to evaluate our system compared to the traditional video-chat setup. Tasks with varying equality of roles for the participants were performed. Results indicated that our system has higher degree of social presence compared to traditional video-chat systems. This conclusion was supported by the positive feedback from the subjects.