Design and Analysis of Social Interaction in Virtual Meeting Space

Abstract

In this thesis, we propose new approaches to support daily conversations via computer network. First, we designed a meeting environment where social interaction is casual and relaxed. Then, we designed a character acting as an in-between of people. Videoconferencing systems usually make a user see and hear all the other users. This style of interaction ts formal meetings where everyone discusses the same topic together. However, that interface cannot e ectively support casual meetings like daily conversations. While some studies tried to design special functions that extend videoconferencing systems to support casual interaction, we combined simply three-dimensional virtual spaces with video-mediated communication. Casual meetings play an important role in workplaces as well as in everyday life. Casual meetings are characterized by spontaneous conversations and meetings with many people. People accidentally form groups to have multiple conversations in the same place. Telephone-like protocol to start interaction cannot support spontaneous conversations. Videoconferencing systems usually display the videos of all the meeting participants at once. That interface prevents participants from forming subgroups. We developed a virtual meeting space FreeWalk that provides a common virtual space for spontaneous interaction. Users can change their positions to select whom they observe and listen to, and to form conversation groups. FreeWalk provides a three-dimensional virtual space where everyone can meet and talk with each other. In the space, each user is embodied as a object on which his/her video image is pasted, has a location and a view direction. Users can approach someone to begin talking, and watch what others are doing from a distance. Conversations may occur when walking users encounter accidentally. Since voice volume attenuates in proportion to the distance between the sender and the receiver, users can form multiple groups, each of which is separately located in the same space. Users can smoothly join the conversation that attracts their interest, since they can guess the topic by listening to the conversation beforehand. In FreeWalk, the spatial positions determine how