Videoconference and Embodied VR: Communication Patterns Across Task and Medium

Ahsan Abdullah,Jan Kolkmeier,Michael Neff,Vivian Lo

doi:10.1145/3479597

Abstract

Videoconference has become the dominant technology for remote meetings. Embodied Virtual Reality is a potential alternative that employs motion tracking in order to place people in a shared virtual environment as avatars. This paper describes a 210 participant study focused on behavioral measures that compares multiparty interaction in videoconference and embodied VR across a range of task types: a factual intellective task, a subjective judgment task and two negotiation tasks, one with visual grounding. It uses state-of-the-art body, face and finger tracking to drive the avatars in VR and a carefully matched videoconferencing implementation. Significant behavioral differences are observed. These include increased activity in videoconference related to maintaining the social connection: more person directed gaze and increased verbal and nonverbal backchannel behavior. Videoconference also had reduced conversational overlap, increased self-adaptor gestures and reduced deictic gestures as compared with embodied VR. Potential explanations and implications are discussed.

Highlights

Videoconference, the dominant medium for remote meetings, uses video cameras to provide remote participants with a 2D, screen-based visual connection
Contributions: As far as we are aware, this paper reports on the first large scale comparative study of behavioral patterns of triad interaction across videoconference and embodied virtual reality (VR)
Participants in VC spent significantly more time looking at their interaction partners than in VR across all tasks, on average, 56% more time

Summary

Introduction

Videoconference, the dominant medium for remote meetings, uses video cameras to provide remote participants with a 2D, screen-based visual connection. Embodied VR, an emerging alternative, uses motion tracking and VR headsets to place participants in a shared 3D environment This immersive 3D experience is more similar to face-to-face interaction, at a lower fidelity, and it is important to understand how it impacts the collaborative experience. This paper describes a study comparing people’s behavioral patterns across the two media and over a set of four tasks spanning different elements of workplace meetings It builds on a long standing interest in how the affordances of communication media support various tasks [14, 19, 61]. Conversation is a collaborative process in which meaning is incrementally constructed together It relies on both coordination and communication across verbal and nonverbal channels. It is postulated that the increased verbal communication is a compensation for visual grounding that is less effective than in face-to-face settings [20]

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