Effects of Digital Avatar on Perceived Social Presence and Co-presence in Business Meetings Between the Managers and Their Co-workers

Abstract

Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, more people in the workforce, especially in the IT industry, started working from home. This brought a set of issues and challenges for both workers and companies across the globe such as losing touch with other co-workers. This could potentially result in decrease of the performance and innovation. This paper investigates effects of using digital avatar robots in virtual meeting environment, specifically, focusing on the perception of social presence and co-presence between workers and their managers. Our experiment results showed that majority of participants felt an improvement in social presence, co-presence and overall virtual meeting experience while using digital avatar for their meetings, especially to those who has a meeting with less familiar persons or persons from the higher corporate hierarchy.