Action Augmented Real Virtuality: A Design for Presence

This paper addresses the important question of how to design a video teleconferencing setup to increase the experience of spatial and social presence. Traditional video teleconferencing setups are lacking in presenting the nonverbal behaviors that humans express in face-to-face communication, which results in decrease in presence-experience. In order to address this issue, we first present a conceptual framework of presence for video teleconferencing. We introduce a modern presence concept called real virtuality and propose a new way of achieving this based on body or artifact actions to increase the feeling of presence, and we named this concept presence through actions. Using this new concept, we present the design of a novel action-augmented real virtuality prototype that considers the challenges related to the design of an action prototype, action embodiment, and face representation. Our action prototype is a telepresence mechatronic robot (TEBoT), and action embodiment is through a head-mounted display (HMD). The face representation solves the problem of face occlusion introduced by the HMD. The novel combination of HMD, TEBoT, and face representation algorithm has been tested in a real video teleconferencing scenario for its ability to solve the challenges related to spatial and social presence. We have performed a user study where the invited participants were requested to experience our novel setup and to compare it with a traditional video teleconferencing setup. The results show that the action capabilities not only increase the feeling of spatial presence but also increase the feeling of social presence of a remote person among local collaborators.