The relationship between the arrangement of participants and the comfortableness of conversation in HyperMirror

Abstract

HyperMirror is a new type of video conversation system which does not simulate face-to-face conversation in real space. In real space, people may feel that a relative positional relationship to the other person is comfortable and sometimes that it is not. They seem to feel a similar relationship also in HyperMirror. In this paper, we observe the relationship between arrangement of participants on the HyperMirror screen and comfortableness of conversation by changing position of the camera and the participants' standing positions. We find two facts; in the HyperMirror screen, they feel at ease to speak when they are near or look toward their partner, and it is more important that they look toward their partner than that they are looked toward.