When a group of people get together in a physical room, they start to talk to each other in a distinctive way. When you listen to the happy chatter of people in a room, you know right away that they are engaged in that most human of activities, enjoying each other’s company.
You never hear that kind of joyful noise in a Zoom call. Something essential is simply missing.
It seems to me that a useful measure of the effectiveness of remote virtual co-presence would be the presence of just this sort of happy chatter. We could probably develop an instrument, perhaps employing machine learning, that would recognize this distinctive style of human communication.
This suggests an interesting potential method of instrumenting research in this area: For any given proposed solution to virtual co-presence, measure the degree to which party talk spontaneously emerges. Based on that measurement, continually iterate the experimental design.
Hey Ken,
If a zoom session were augmented with binaural sound to give users a decent 3D representation of other user’s relative position, do you think that “happy chatter” would be recreated?
JK