AR-based video-mediated communication: A social presence enhancing experience

Abstract — 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. We conducted a preliminary pilot study with 10 participants coupled in 5 pairs to evaluate our system and compare with the traditional video-chat setup. 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. Keywords- augmented reality; social presence; video-mediated communication. I