Evaluation Factors for Multi-Stakeholder Broadband Visual Communication Projects

This paper presents a summary of multifaceted evaluation factors that we have identified through our research with Broadband Visual Communication (BVC) projects involving multiple stakeholders. The main benefit of these evaluation factors is that they provide a general evaluation framework for multiple stakeholder projects. The factors are social infrastructure, technical infrastructure, physical space, interaction style and content

Mutual Gaze Support in Videoconferencing Reviewed

Videoconferencing allows geographically dispersed parties to communicate by simultaneous audio and video transmissions. It is used in a variety of application scenarios with a wide range of coordination needs and efforts, such as private chat, discussion meetings, and negotiation tasks. In particular, in scenarios requiring certain levels of trust and judgement non-verbal communication, cues are highly important for effective communication. Mutual gaze support plays a central role in those high coordination need scenarios but generally lacks adequate technical support from videoconferencing systems. In this paper, we review technical concepts and implementations for mutual gaze support in videoconferencing, classify them, evaluate them according to a defined set of criteria, and give recommendations for future developments. Our review gives decision makers, researchers, and developers a tool to systematically apply and further develop videoconferencing systems in serious settings requiring mutual gaze. This should lead to well-informed decisions regarding the use and development of this technology and to a more widespread exploitation of the benefits of videoconferencing in general. For example, if videoconferencing systems supported high-quality mutual gaze in an easy-to-set-up and easy-to-use way, we could hold more effective and efficient recruitment interviews, court hearings, or contract negotiations

CineScale2: a dataset of cinematic camera features in movies

The position and orientation of the camera in relation to the subject(s) in a movie scene, namely camera "level" and camera "angle", are essential features in the film-making process due to their influence on the viewer's perception of the scene. We provide a database containing camera feature annotations on camera angle and camera level, for about 25,000 image frames. Frames are sampled from a wide range of movies, freely available images, and shots from cinematographic websites, and are annotated on the following five categories - Overhead, High, Neutral, Low, and Dutch - for what concerns camera angle, and on six different classes of camera level: Aerial, Eye, Shoulder, Hip, Knee, and Ground level. This dataset is an extension of the Cinescale dataset [1], which contains movie frames and related annotations regarding shot scale. The CineScale2 database enables AI-driven interpretation of shot scale data and opens to a large set of research activities related to the automatic visual analysis of cinematic material, such as movie stylistic analysis, video recommendation, and media psychology. To these purposes, we also provide the model and the code for building a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture for automated camera feature recognition. All the material is provided on the the project website; video frames can be also provided upon requests to authors, for research purposes under fair use

Macaque cardiac physiology is sensitive to the valence of passively viewed sensory stimuli.

Autonomic nervous system activity is an important component of affective experience. We demonstrate in the rhesus monkey that both the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system respond differentially to the affective valence of passively viewed video stimuli. We recorded cardiac impedance and an electrocardiogram while adult macaques watched a series of 300 30-second videos that varied in their affective content. We found that sympathetic activity (as measured by cardiac pre-ejection period) increased and parasympathetic activity (as measured by respiratory sinus arrhythmia) decreased as video content changes from positive to negative. These findings parallel the relationship between autonomic nervous system responsivity and valence of stimuli in humans. Given the relationship between human cardiac physiology and affective processing, these findings suggest that macaque cardiac physiology may be an index of affect in nonverbal animals

Sonic Proxemics and the Art of Persuasion: An Analytical Framework

This paper introduces a framework for the creation and analysis of sonic spatialization and proxemics in audiovisual media. The authors apply the framework to three public service announcements to show how sonic proxemics can be used as a rhetorical device that may be used to strengthen political aims

I\u27ll See You on Myspace

Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook are a popular online venue for interaction and expression. This study was designed to identify the ways in which people present themselves online in the social network environment of MySpace.com. To examine the types of self-presentation displayed in MySpace profiles, this study drew from current online research, self-presentation theory (Goffman, 1959 Jones, 1990), nonverbal traditions, and the field of visual communication to develop a novel measurement scheme which could be used to analyze photographic and textual elements. Content analysis of a random sample of public profiles selected from MySpace.com focused primarily on the photographic self-presentation found in the primary profile photograph. The content analysis revealed that competence and ingratiation were the most commonly used strategies exhibited in the sampled profiles. Additionally, significant relationships were found between intimidating behaviors and the intended audience, and intimidating behaviors and the user\u27s sex. Demographic information revealed that males and females were equally represented in the sample, and racial/ethnic diversity closely resembled the U.S. population as reported in the 2000 U.S. Census. Furthermore, non-significant results suggest a possible relationship between the user\u27s sex and the types of nonverbal behaviors demonstrated in the photograph, similar to Goffman\u27s (1979) work on gender displays in commercial advertising photograph

A Comparison of Avatar-, Video-, and Robot-Mediated Interaction on Users’ Trust in Expertise

Communication technologies are becoming increasingly diverse in form and functionality. A central concern is the ability to detect whether others are trustworthy. Judgments of trustworthiness rely, in part, on assessments of non-verbal cues, which are affected by media representations. In this research, we compared trust formation on three media representations. We presented 24 participants with advisors represented by two of the three alternate formats: video, avatar, or robot. Unknown to the participants, one was an expert, and the other was a non-expert. We observed participants’ advice-seeking behavior under risk as an indicator of their trust in the advisor. We found that most participants preferred seeking advice from the expert, but we also found a tendency for seeking robot or video advice. Avatar advice, in contrast, was more rarely sought. Users’ self-reports support these findings. These results suggest that when users make trust assessments, the physical presence of the robot representation might compensate for the lack of identity cues