OpenMic: Utilizing Proxemic Metaphors for Conversational Floor Transitions in Multiparty Video Meetings
Austin Houck
University of Virginia
Turn-Taking
How did you feel when you didn’t know how long it would be until your speaking turn or when someone started a turn ahead of you?
In multi-party conversations, taking turns can be even more challenging.
- In physical spaces, visual cues (e.g., head-turning or directional gaze cues) play a significant role in mediate turn-taking.
- Current video-conferencing tools lack the support of visual cues for people to convey their turn-taking needs.
|
Why Turn-Taking is challenging ONLINE
In physical spaces, visual cues (e.g., head-turning or directional gaze cues) play a significant role in mediate turn-taking.
Current video-conferencing tools lack the support of visual cues for people to convey their turn-taking needs. With the arbitrary ordering of videos,
|
OpenMic
To address this issue, OpenMic is exploring the use of proxemic metaphors to convey speaking turn needs in 2D virtual spaces.
This approach aims to provide a more intuitive and effective way for people to signal their turn-taking needs during video conferencing.
We propose:
- a Virtual Floor that serves as a fixed-feature space for users to be aware of others’ intention to talk
- Malleable Mirrors, which are video and screen feeds that can be continuously moved and resized for conveying speaking turns.
|
OpenMic Design Principles
We draw two notions from the proxemic theory to design new mechanisms for turn-taking in multiparty remote meetings.
- The Virtual Floor as a Fixed Feature
Theory: The first notion, the fixed and semi-fixed feature space, describes how furniture and built space affect our social relationships.
Design: The Virtual Floor serves as a fixed-feature space for users to be aware of others’ intention to talk and defining a boundary for managing conversations.
- Malleable Mirrors On and Around the Virtual Floor for Perceived Proxemic Distances
Theory:
The perceptual cues of proximity not only include the relative and interpersonal distances, but also, the image size.
For instance, when a person moves closer to others, the image appears to be larger.
Design: Hence, OpenMic mimics this metaphor by simultaneously transforming the position and size of the video feed when on the Floor to convey turn-taking intentions. When a person moves the video feed closer to the Floor center, their video appears to be larger.
Discussion and Highlights
We categorize users’ partitioning of the virtual space into four types of Turn-taking Zones. These zones show how users utilize the size and position of their malleable mirrors to enact different speaker roles (e.g., passive and central speakers, and audiences) and the trade-offs in free vs. curated positioning of videos.
These zones include the Audience Zone, Near-Edge Zone, Transition Zone, and Center Zone.
- The Near-Edge Zone serves as a temporary peripheral zone where participants position their video feeds on a smaller scale closer to the boundary.
- Movement in the Transition Zone reveals diverse and rich interactions that are characterized by subtle proxemic cues.
- As participants move across to the Center Zone, it signifies a change in the conversation state, which some active speakers may utilize to take control of the conversation.
- When used in moderation, relative position can serve as a cue for addressing either an individual or a group during a meeting.
|
Bibtex
@inproceedings{10.1145/3544548.3581013,
author = {Hu, Erzhen and Grønbæk, Jens Emil Sloth and Houck, Austin and Heo, Seongkook},
title = {OpenMic: Utilizing Proxemic Metaphors for Conversational Floor Transitions in Multiparty Video Meetings},
year = {2023},
isbn = {978-1-4503-9421-5/23/04},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581013},
doi = {10.1145/3544548.3581013},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
numpages = {22},
keywords = {multiparty video meeting, video conferencing, turn-taking, nonverbal cues, proxemics},
location = {Hamburg, Germany},
series = {CHI '23}}
|