Supporting Relationships with Video Chat

Video chat is often called the “closest thing to being there”, but anyone who has used video chat to maintain personal relationships or collaborate with others knows that video chat is not the same as face-to-face interaction. In this thesis, I focus on understanding how video chat can be most effectively designed and used to support relationships, helping to bridge the communication gap for distance separated people. An important difference between video chat and face-to-face interaction is potential effects of seeing oneself. In this thesis, I present two studies exploring this important caveat to supporting relationships remotely. The first study shows that the dominant interface design (which shows one’s own video feed) has measurable effects on people’s experiences and conversations in VMC. The second study focuses on a specific group of people—those with social anxiety—who may be particularly affected by self-view in video chat interfaces. This study shows that interfaces that focus on content (much like the media sharing system presented in this thesis) have the potential to minimize effects of feedback in video chat. Another key difference between video chat and face-to-face interaction is the difficulty of engaging in shared activities. Colocated friends or family members can easily share activities such as walks, movies, or board games; distance separated people have a much harder time doing the same. The work presented in this thesis introduces a synchronous media sharing system that can serve as a powerful tool for maintaining relationships. Building on this work, I show that synchronous media sharing is also useful for creating new relationships as well. Together, the system and studies presented in this thesis provide valuable new insights and techniques for the development of video chat tools that support new and sustained relationships over a distance