Assessing the effectiveness of telepresence for business meetings

Business meetings conducted using fully-immersive telepresence systems provide participants with the lifelike-experience of a face-to-face meeting and offer the cost- and time-saving advantages of computer-mediated communication. However, telepresence systems are still much more expensive than simpler computer-mediated meeting modes, which makes the choice of this technology for business meetings a non-trivial decision problem. In this study, drawing upon the literature on social presence, media richness, and media appropriateness that relate media choice to task characteristics and objectives, we identify 19 objectives for business meetings. We then present hypotheses on the effectiveness of various meeting modes for achieving these objectives, focusing on the social presence dimension of four meeting modes (audio-conferencing, video-conferencing, telepresence, and face-to-face). We test these hypotheses using survey data from a large company in which all the technologies are available on a relatively broad basis.