AR-based Video-Mediated Communication: A Social Presence Enhancing Experience

Video-mediated communication systems attempt toprovide users with a channel that could bring out the "feeling"of face-to-face communication. Among the many qualities thesesystems aim for, a high level of Social Presence isunquestionably a desirable one; however, little effort has beenmade to improve upon the user's perception of "presence". Wepropose an AR approach to enhance social presence for video mediatedsystems by allowing one user to be present in theother user's video image. We conducted a preliminary pilotstudy with 10 participants coupled in 5 pairs to evaluate oursystem and compare with the traditional video-chat setup.Results indicated that our system has higher degree of socialpresence compared to traditional video-chat systems. Thisconclusion was supported by the positive feedback from thesubjects.