Go together: providing nonverbal awareness cues to enhance co-located sensation in remote communication

Nowadays, people are easy to have a remote conferencing in different scenarios. However, the potential of mobile video communication has yet to be fully exploited. In our research, we explore providing multiple nonverbal awareness cues to create deeper empathy or understanding between users in the telecommunication. We present our design for the use of remote communication between two geographically separated users. This system provides mutual nonverbal communication cues including independent viewpoint and gesture cue to support natural human-to-human interactions. Using our setups, two users are able to perform multiple joint activities including talking, looking and gesturing together. Finally, users can share co-located sensation and feel themselves “go together” side-by-side in the same place. We performed a evaluation to explore our system’s usability and how multiple awareness cues affect the remote communication. It consists of two experiments: an asymmetric work in which an indoor helper instructed a walking worker and a symmetric collaboration in a more realistic scenario. The positive results show that our design could significantly improve the human-to-human interactions and enhance co-located sensation.