Refining personal and social presence in virtual meetings

Virtual worlds show promise for conducting meetings and conferences without the need for physical travel. Current experience suggests the major limitation to the more widespread adoption and acceptance of virtual conferences is the failure of existing environments to provide a sense of immersion and engagement, or of ‘being there’. These limitations are largely related to the appearance and control of avatars, and to the absence of means to convey non-verbal cues of facial expression and body language. This paper reports on a study involving the use of a mass-market motion sensor (Kinect™) and the mapping of participant action in the real world to avatar behaviour in the virtual world. This is coupled with full-motion video representation of participant’s faces on their avatars to resolve both identity and facial expression issues. The outcomes of a small-group trial meeting based on this technology show a very positive reaction from participants, and the potential for further exploration of these concepts

Education Unleashed: Participatory Culture, Education, and Innovation in Second Life

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and LearningWhile virtual worlds share common technologies and audiences with games, they possess many unique characteristics. Particularly when compared to massively multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual worlds create very different learning and teaching opportunities through markets, creation, and connections to the real world, and lack of overt game goals. This chapter aims to expose a wide audience to the breadth and depth of learning occurring within Second Life (SL). From in-world classes in the scripting language to mixed-reality conferences about the future of broadcasting, a tremendous variety of both amateurs and experts are leveraging SL as a platform for education. In one sense, this isn't new since every technology is co-opted by communities for communication, but SL is different because every aspect of it was designed to encourage this co-opting, this remixing of the virtual and the real

The design and implementation of a virtual conference system

[[abstract]]With the enormous use of networks, many real-world activities are realized on the Internet. We propose a complete virtual conference system (VCS) to handle all activities of real-world conferences. The VCS includes a virtual conference management system and a mobile virtual conference system. Video conferencing is a trend of future communications. With the improvement of broadband network technologies, video conferencing becomes possible in the global society. It is feasible to use video conferencing technologies to organize future international conferences. This research proposes a total solution toward virtual conferencing. We use a mobile server/storage pre-broadcasting technique, as well as a communication network optimization algorithm, which is based on a graph computation mechanism. With the assistance of a conference management system, the system is able to support virtual conferencing in the future academic society[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20001025~20001027[[conferencelocation]]Taipei, Taiwa

Scheduling Virtual Conferences Fairly: {A}chieving Equitable Participant and Speaker Satisfaction

Recently, almost all conferences have moved to virtual mode due to the pandemic-induced restrictions on travel and social gathering. Contrary to in-person conferences, virtual conferences face the challenge of efficiently scheduling talks, accounting for the availability of participants from different timezones and their interests in attending different talks. A natural objective for conference organizers is to maximize efficiency, e.g., total expected audience participation across all talks. However, we show that optimizing for efficiency alone can result in an unfair virtual conference schedule, where individual utilities for participants and speakers can be highly unequal. To address this, we formally define fairness notions for participants and speakers, and derive suitable objectives to account for them. As the efficiency and fairness objectives can be in conflict with each other, we propose a joint optimization framework that allows conference organizers to design schedules that balance (i.e., allow trade-offs) among efficiency, participant fairness and speaker fairness objectives. While the optimization problem can be solved using integer programming to schedule smaller conferences, we provide two scalable techniques to cater to bigger conferences. Extensive evaluations over multiple real-world datasets show the efficacy and flexibility of our proposed approaches.Comment: In proceedings of the Thirty-first Web Conference (WWW-2022). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2010.1462

The use of built-in digital backchannels in professional communication within academic conferences in virtual worlds: A comparison with the use of Twitter in real life conferences

This paper deals with the use of built-in digital backchannels within academic conferences in three dimensional virtual worlds (VW) and combines qualitative and quantitative methods to answer the following research questions: does the use of built-in digital backchannels enhance communication, collaboration and knowledge expansion amongst participants in professional communication academic conferences within VW? How can those benefits be articulated? And how does communication in built-in digital backchannels in VW conferences compare to communication through Twitter in real life conferences? This paper builds upon authors’ previous research in which, through purely qualitative methods, six distinct categories of learning were identified and provided insights on how participants should behave in a socially acceptable way in such virtual conferences, as well as on how VW presentations were received by members of the audienc

Leveraging Green Computing for Increased Viability and Sustainability

Greening of computing processes is an environmental strategy gaining momentum in the 21st century as evidenced by increased virtual communications. Because of the rising cost of fuel to travel to meetings and conferences, corporations are adopting sophisticated technologies that provide a “personal” experience for geographically disbursed colleagues to interact in real time. This article highlights several companies and academic professional organizations that utilize video conferencing, virtual classrooms, and virtual worlds to create digital spaces for collaboration. The article compares the impact of face-to-face collaboration that includes business travel expenses to the impact of the same activity in a virtual space. The human side of technology is also examined through virtual human resource development that increases employees’ learning capacity and performance improvement. As advances in technology continue, it is expected that meetings will become more lifelike with the improvement of holographics. Corporations must continue to integrate green strategies to satisfy both environmental concerns and financial viability

The multi-hub academic conference : global, inclusive, culturally diverse, creative, sustainable

New conference formats are emerging in response to COVID-19 and climate change. Virtual conferences are sustainable and inclusive regardless of participant mobility (financial means, caring commitments, disability), but lack face-to-face contact. Hybrid conferences (physical meetings with additional virtual presentations) tend to discriminate against non-fliers and encourage unsustainable flying. Multi-hub conferences mix real and virtual interactions during talks and social breaks and are distributed across nominally equal hubs. We propose a global multi-hub solution in which all hubs interact daily in real time with all other hubs in parallel sessions by internet videoconferencing. Conference sessions are confined to three equally-spaced 4-h UTC timeslots. Local programs comprise morning and afternoon/evening sessions (recordings from night sessions can be watched later). Three reference hubs are located exactly 8 h apart; additional hubs are within 2 h and their programs are aligned with the closest reference hub. The conference experience at each hub depends on the number of local participants and the time difference to the nearest reference. Participants are motivated to travel to the nearest hub. Mobility-based discrimination is minimized. Lower costs facilitate diversity, equity, and inclusion. Academic quality, creativity, enjoyment, and low-carbon sustainability are simultaneously promoted