# Designing a Collaborative Virtual Conference Application: Challenges, Requirements and Guidelines
## 4 Results
### Web Camera Usage/Affective Input  
Moods, feelings, and emotions, or affective input, can be communicated across the virtual conference application by using features such as switching on the web camera to provide live input of emotional expressions. Another way to express emotions is through the reactions feature. In one section of the questionnaire, participants were asked if they could identify the emotions of other group members who were participating in the collaborative task in the same user study session as them. It was found that participants agreed that it was hard to read the emotions of other group members in the session, because they had all turned off their web cameras most of the time. Several reasons were cited by the participants for their less affective behavior, including: (1) reducing the consumption of their mobile data, (2) hiding the less-than-ideal background environment in which they participated in the user study, e.g., busy, messy, etc., (3) protecting their privacy, and (4) avoiding showing their self-body image due to low confidence. Two participants mentioned hardware issues with their web cameras, and one participant admitted to being away from her computer for a period of time. Figure 5 highlights the reasons provided by the participants for disabling their web camera during virtual conference meetings.  
Figure 4: Distribution of user’s perceived ease of use of the features on virtual conferencing tool.  
The participants in the usability study were also asked when they would be willing to turn on the web camera. It was discovered that participants neither enabled nor disabled the web camera continuously. The participants stated that they usually enabled the web camera \"when being asked\", which rated the highest. The second most important factor influencing whether they switched on the web cameras was having to \"give a presentation\", followed by \"performing group activity\". Figure 6 shows the results of different situations in which participants were willing to turn on their web cameras during a video conference meeting.  
The usability study also asked participants how they felt when other group members' web cameras were turned off while performing collaborative activities. The majority of the participants (69%) were neutral and impartial, meaning it did not matter to them if the web camera was switched on or off by other group members. Around 20% of the participants associated the web cameras being turned off with negative feelings, with 13% describing a sense of loneliness and isolation and another 6% describing feelings of boredom and demotivation. On the contrary, the remaining 12% of the participants  
Figure 5: Top reasons for disabling the web camera during virtual conferences.  
Figure 6: Bar chart of web camera usage during a video conference meeting.  
reported feeling more comfortable and relaxed (less anxious) when their peers turned off the camera. Figure 7 depicts the breakdown of the feelings experienced by the participants when the web cameras of their peers were turned off during a virtual meeting.