Embodiment of Video-mediated Communication Enhances Social Telepresence

There are several merits to embody the remote partner's body to the video conference: showing it physically, making a physical contact, and enhancing social telepresence. In this paper, we tackled to embody a part of a remote partner's body in a video conference. As a method to show how effectively the embodied body part works, we focused on face-to-face communication of the hand gestures such as thumb wrestling, finger number game and pointing. We developed a robotic arm, which seems the remote partner's arm popped out from the video. Our robot arm synchronizes with the remote partner's arm movements. We conducted experiments to verify the method of embodying a part of a remote partner's body. We found that, our method reduced the feeling of being far from the remote partner, and enhanced social telepresence, comparing video and physical embodiment.