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Eery Space: Facilitating Virtual Meetings Through Remote Proxemics

Maurício Sousa, Daniel Mendes, Alfredo Ferreira, João Madeiras Pereira, Joaquim Jorge

TL;DR

This work addresses the lack of natural proxemic cues in virtual meetings by introducing Remote Proxemics and Eery Space, a shared virtual locus that merges multiple rooms to support side-by-side interaction among local and remote participants. The authors implement a Unity3D-based client-server prototype with Kinect-based tracking and a suite of awareness techniques (floor projections, shadows, and haptic feedback) to mediate person-to-person and person-to-device interactions, including a moderator role for shared displays. An evaluation with 12 participants demonstrates that remote proxemics can match the ease of local interactions and maintain awareness, even without avatars, suggesting practical viability for distributed collaboration. The work also outlines future directions such as automatic device binding via computer vision and incorporation of f-formations to enrich remote interactions.

Abstract

Virtual meetings have become increasingly common with modern video-conference and collaborative software. While they allow obvious savings in time and resources, current technologies add unproductive layers of protocol to the flow of communication between participants, rendering the interactions far from seamless. In this work we introduce Remote Proxemics, an extension of proxemics aimed at bringing the syntax of co-located proximal interactions to virtual meetings. We propose Eery Space, a shared virtual locus that results from merging multiple remote areas, where meeting participants' are located side-by-side as if they shared the same physical location. Eery Space promotes collaborative content creation and seamless mediation of communication channels based on virtual proximity. Results from user evaluation suggest that our approach is effective at enhancing mutual awareness between participants and sufficient to initiate proximal exchanges regardless of their geolocation, while promoting smooth interactions between local and remote people alike. These results happen even in the absence of visual avatars and other social devices such as eye contact, which are largely the focus of previous approaches.

Eery Space: Facilitating Virtual Meetings Through Remote Proxemics

TL;DR

This work addresses the lack of natural proxemic cues in virtual meetings by introducing Remote Proxemics and Eery Space, a shared virtual locus that merges multiple rooms to support side-by-side interaction among local and remote participants. The authors implement a Unity3D-based client-server prototype with Kinect-based tracking and a suite of awareness techniques (floor projections, shadows, and haptic feedback) to mediate person-to-person and person-to-device interactions, including a moderator role for shared displays. An evaluation with 12 participants demonstrates that remote proxemics can match the ease of local interactions and maintain awareness, even without avatars, suggesting practical viability for distributed collaboration. The work also outlines future directions such as automatic device binding via computer vision and incorporation of f-formations to enrich remote interactions.

Abstract

Virtual meetings have become increasingly common with modern video-conference and collaborative software. While they allow obvious savings in time and resources, current technologies add unproductive layers of protocol to the flow of communication between participants, rendering the interactions far from seamless. In this work we introduce Remote Proxemics, an extension of proxemics aimed at bringing the syntax of co-located proximal interactions to virtual meetings. We propose Eery Space, a shared virtual locus that results from merging multiple remote areas, where meeting participants' are located side-by-side as if they shared the same physical location. Eery Space promotes collaborative content creation and seamless mediation of communication channels based on virtual proximity. Results from user evaluation suggest that our approach is effective at enhancing mutual awareness between participants and sufficient to initiate proximal exchanges regardless of their geolocation, while promoting smooth interactions between local and remote people alike. These results happen even in the absence of visual avatars and other social devices such as eye contact, which are largely the focus of previous approaches.
Paper Structure (15 sections, 7 figures, 1 table)

This paper contains 15 sections, 7 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Eery Space
  4. Social Bubbles
  5. Remote Proxemics
  6. Prototype
  7. System Architecture
  8. Tracking People
  9. Providing Awareness
  10. Evaluation
  11. Methodology
  12. Performed Tasks
  13. Participants
  14. Results and Discussion
  15. Conclusions and Future Work

Figures (7)

  • Figure 1: Eery Space, merging two different sized rooms into the same virtual space. The different colours match people to their corresponding physical room.
  • Figure 2: Social Bubbles: (A) While distant from one another, (B) A social bubble happens when people's personal spaces intersect.
  • Figure 3: Remote Proxemics: (A) Two local people and one remote (outlined in white) created a social bubble and are engaged in collaborative work. (B) The remote participant, closest to the wall display, acts as the moderator, controlling what can be shown in he shared visualization.
  • Figure 4: The Architecture of the Eery Space prototype.
  • Figure 5: Awareness Techniques: (A) Circles projected on the floor depict the location of people in the Eery Space. In this case, a remote and a local user are establishing a social bubble. (B) Users shadows depicting two participants on the wall display. The larger shadow indicates that the remote person has the moderator role (green).
  • ...and 2 more figures