A framework for assessing and enhancing social and spatial presence in mediated communication to support remote collaboration

Abstract: Although extended reality (XR) technologies offer promising new ways to interact and collaborate, adoption of XR in real world applications comes with significant challenges. This is especially true for remote collaboration settings, which are often characterized by heterogeneity. Knowledge is transferred from an expert to a novice, users are located in different physical locations with different systems and often only a limited number of users perform activities in the physical world.In this setting an especial challenge is a lack of guidance on how to measure and improve the quality of mixed reality interaction. Presence, specifically social presence and spatial presence, are two key aspects to measure the quality of experience in XR and computer-mediated communication in general. A multitude of social presence measures is available, but few studies attempt to provide a comprehensive way to measure all underlying factors of presence that affect the quality of experience, much less offer support on how to improve on these factors. Moreover, most measures of presence focus solely on XR applications, while a mix of communication systems is use. In this paper, we aim to address these issues and propose a comprehensive framework for the assessment and enhancement of social and spatial presence based on existing literature, regardless of the actual technology used. The framework provides a breakdown of relevant subscales of spatial and social presence in remote collaboration, easy-to-use means to measure these subscales and offers different degrees of system recommendations based on social cues that have been found to evoke presence on the respective subscales. Lastly, our framework includes practical suggestions for accommodating different types of users within a use case to ensure quality of experience for all users involved. Our framework should enable XR-developers and end-users to optimize their system for their specific application.

Keywords: social presence, spatial presence, cmc, extended reality, social interaction, human factors, communication, remote collaboration

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1004576

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