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.