Future non-verbal communication

Humans are very good at picking up on subtle non-verbal cues. We can generally tell when somebody is nervous, or excited, or joyful or confused, without needing to hear a single word.

There is, reasonably enough, much worry about whether these sorts of important interpersonal cues will be preserved when people are having extended conversations in a shared virtual world. But I am not worried. In fact, quite the opposite.

When you and I speak on the phone, we don’t feel that our inability to see each other visually destroys our ability to communicate. Instead, we both understand quite well that the only channel we have is voice, so we pay more attention to vocal cues. When communicating with each other, people are very good at sussing out where the good quality information is, and focusing their attention accordingly.

I think something similar will happen for face to face communication in virtual worlds. At first, the body cues will be a strict subset of those in real life. We will be able to see each others’ head movements, and then perhaps hand movements, but it will take a little while longer to transmit all of the subtleties of full body motion.

At every step of this evolution, we will instinctively know where the quality information is coming from, because that’s what people are good at. Once we are used to any particular mode of future face to face commmunication, we won’t think of it as odd, or off-putting, any more than we currently think that way about talking to each other on the phone.

But what if it’s even better than that? What if it turns out that our brains are more evolved and capable at supporting face to face communication than our bodies are?

If that is so, then there might come a point when computationally enhanced body language actually lets us convey and apprehend subtle cues of body language that are not possible in physical reality. When that happens, we might find that body language and facial expression, suitably enhanced by computer intermediation, will allow us to communicate with each other more effectively than was ever before possible in the history of humanity.

After a generation or two of living with such advanced support for non-verbal communication, people might wonder how the human race ever got along without it.

One thought on “Future non-verbal communication”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *