Behavioral Analysis of Kinetic Telepresence for Small Symmetric Group-to-Group Meetings

Nonverbal behavior analysis revealed the effect of MMSpace, a kinetic telepresence developed for social telepresence, on small symmetric group-to-group conversations. MMSpace consists of kinetic avatars, equipped with flat projection screen panels as faces, that can change their pose and position automatically to mirror the remote user's head motions. The advantage is the realistic kinetic expression of human head movements, which form gestures like nodding and indicate the focus of visual attention, through the use of four degree-of-freedom low-latency precision actuators. Another feature is the support of eye contact among remote participants, which is made possible by the avatar's kinetic pose changes and by adaptive camera selection for orienting the user's face toward the remote addressee. Its limitation is its room-scale infrastructure and restricted participant positions. Targeting a symmetric 2 × 2 setting, participants' nonverbal behaviors, including gaze directions and head gestures, were compared among three conditions, MMSpace with/without physical motions and face-to-face settings. There was a significant difference between the conditions in terms of the duration of glance/mutual glances, total gaze transition time, amount of head gesturing, and co-occurrences of head gestures in the remote participants. The results indicate that the avatar's physical motion can elicit longer (mutual) glances with a shorter total transition time and more (co-)occurrences of head gestures, and it makes MMSpace -based conversations closer, in terms of these nonverbal statistics, to face-to-face ones compared with those of a static version of MMSpace without physical motion.