Being Here: Enhancing the Presence of a Remote Person through Real-Time Display Integration of the Remote Figure and the Local Background

Abstract

Videoconferencing continues to emerge as a popular means of connecting remote participants. One of its goals is to establish a sense of presence through video imagery. One way to achieve a highly realistic presence is to generate a life-sized image of a remote person on a large display. However, in this case, the display conceals a large region of the local person’s front view, and replaces it with the remote site background. This may affect the viewer’s sense of the remote person’s presence. To resolve these conflicting effects, we propose a method involving the superimposition of the remote person’s figure on the local site front view. In this way, the local person may feel as though the remote person is before him/her in his/her spatial environment. The method has been implemented in the Being Here System accordingly. A system evaluation experiment revealed that the proposed method significantly enhanced the perceived presence of the remote person, in comparison with conventional videoconferencing