Abstract We have designed an electronic meeting room where visual displays are ubiquitous. The aim is to reproduce the visual information available to a participant in a face to face meeting. Our initial findings show that this adds to the feeling of social presence. In Athens, the Agora was the marketplace, but also a venue where citizens met to talk and gossip. We use this as a metaphor for a business meeting environment that is highly interactive and sociable, and which exploits the wealth of interpersonal skills that people already have.
People wait their turn before speaking.
Issues such as these are responsible for the fact that users rate video meetings more akin to telephone meetings than to real meetings. In the Electronic Agora, video is ubiquitous and used to support the social and psychological elements of meetings. The aim is to provide remote conferees with many of the key proxemic cues that they would receive if physically present. This provides the remote user with a sense of the physical space, and shows different views of the meeting room, just as the user would get if physically present in the room carrying out these various tasks. Because the remote user can easily change position, users that are physically present gain a sense that the remote user is in the room, that is they gain a stronger sense of the other's social presence.