Hello and welcome to the presentation of our work
about the role of social presence for AR cooperation.
This work is a joint work of our research group Human-Centered
Information Systems at Clausthal University of Technology and my name is Niklas Osmers.
Social Presence is concept already fairly known through VR research and according to Biocca, it
describes the feeling of being with somebody else. While in VR, the role of Social Presence
is already quite researched, AR focuses on more than just those virtual remote spaces.
When looking into the literature about Social Presence and AR cooperation, some think that it
is a predictor of cooperation quality while others see no relation between them at all.
So, we felt that only one thing about it is for sure. The definite role of Social Presence
regarding AR cooperation is still unclear. In regard to the co-located and remote
cooperation settings in AR, we identified two unanswered questions.
One, we wanted to know what factors had an influence on Social Presence,
and two, how Social Presence itself influenced cooperation quality.
To answer those questions, we conducted a literature review.
For the literature review, we focused on work presenting empirical results regarding Social
Presence in cooperative AR. While we included both human-to-human and human-to-avatar
cooperation, we only considered AR HMDs or more precisely only opical see-through devices.
We started querying common databases and identified 15 papers in a two-step
screeing procedure. Afterwards, we included nine additional papers through backtracking,
did some final reviewing and resulted in a total of 19 papers entailing a total of 23
different user studies with varying group sizes and cooperation settings.
Throughout these studies, we observed a few interesting coherences.
Regarding factors influencing Social Presence, we noticed that drawing cues may actually be
superior to other awareness cues like pointing, virtual hands, gaze representations and others.
However, we also observed some kind of threshold that is reached when stacking
multiple awareness cues on top of each other. Regarding avatars, we did find that at any case
realistic as well as human-like behavior was preferred by users.
In terms of comparisons between miniature and live-sized avatars, both seem to be helpful
without any clear preference by users. For these observations; however,
it is important to know that both awareness cues and avatar representations only have
an effect when there is an actual need for them created by the task or the setting.
Now looking at the effects of Social Presence on the cooperation quality,
we found two overall co-occurencies. First, it appears that higher levels of
Social Presence most certainly increase the cooperation quality for asymmetric tasks.
For example by reducing task load and completion time or increasing usability for users.
Second, more Social Presence in any case seem to also positively affect
the attitude and preference of users towards said tools.
So, to conclude. We can adhere that the type of task, realistic avatar cues and relevant awareness
cues - like drawing cues I just mentioned earlier - have a positive impact on Social Presence.
Social Presence itself then again has a positive impact on cooperation quality through user
preferences and in case of asymmetric settings other additional factors - as I mentioned.
Now, what do we take home from this? Social Presence seems to be no predictor
for cooperation quality overall, but it most definitely predicts the preferences of users.
However, further reserach is needed to affirm our findings, especially measurements beyond
self-reported data and an analysis of causal interdependencies should be investigated.
So far, so good. My name is Niklas Osmers. Thank you very much for listening
and if you want to find out more about the paper, just follow the QR code.