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

A New Approach to Parental Involvement: The Role of Virtual Parent-Teacher Conferences

Abstract A NEW APPROACH TO PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT: THE ROLE OF THE VIRTUAL PARENT-TEACHER CONFERENCE by Daphne M. Winkler Kennesaw State University, 2016 The purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility of virtual parent-teacher conferences in facilitating parental involvement in the middle school setting. The research was used as a tool to establish whether or not parent involvement could be facilitated by removing barriers to participation, specifically those related to the traditional face-to-face conferences. Ninety-four parents from two middle schools in one county agreed to participate in the study. Of the 94 parents, 54 participated in the face-to-face setting and 40 participated in the virtual setting. Quantitative analysis was used to determine if there were any statically significant perceptional differences evident among conferencing in the traditional face-to-face model versus the virtual model. The findings of this study indicated that time could be saved by using virtual conferencing with parents as a tool for facilitating parental involvement. Satisfaction in the virtual conferences was noted in the surveys completed by parents and teachers. On the other hand, most teachers responded that using virtual conferencing did not save them time. Compared to teachers from the virtual group, teachers from the face-to-face conference showed significantly higher satisfaction toward the parent-teacher conferences. Overall, the findings of this study can support a tool to help bridge the communication gap between parents and teachers by allowing opportunities for parents and teachers to develop strategies that improve communication between home and school

Virtual academic conferences as learning spaces. Factors associated with the perceived value of purely virtual conferences

The COVID-19 outbreak came with an unprecedented opportunity to investigate how the new reality of social distancing and limited international travel will affect the organization of academic conferences. Drawing on conceptualization of academic conferences as professional learning spaces, in this study, we examine the factors associated with the perceived value of purely virtual academic conferences and how such perceptions differ between participants from different research fields. The aim was to gain knowledge about factors that should be considered when designing a virtual conference. Results show satisfaction with social interaction, the extent to which presentations met participants\u27 topics of interest and the perceived importance of learning and getting an overview on the research topic to be related to the value rating. Researchers from different research fields differ significantly in their opinion about the most appropriate conference format regarding getting an overview on the research topic. For some researchers, virtual participation might be a valuable alternative to attending a conference in person. The study serves as a first attempt to understand how and for which target groups virtual conferences serve as a valuable learning event. Further research on this conference format is needed. (DIPF/Orig.

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

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

Comparison and Potentials

UID/SOC/04647/2019Academic conferences have always been privileged spaces and moments for the dissemination of new scientific knowledge, as well as for social interaction and for the establishment and development of social networks among scientists. However, the virtual dimension of conferences, in which individuals are not physically present in the same place, begins to emerge as an increasingly used possibility, which implies a different framing of these scientific events. This paper seeks to comparatively analyse several models of academic conferences, putting forth their advantages, limitations and potentials. Furthermore, it also seeks to reasonably envision the importance and challenges to be faced in the near future. The analysis allows concluding that virtual conferences tend to take on an increasingly central role in this type of scientific dissemination, but without totally relegating the conference mode with face-to-face interaction. Moreover, there may be conferences that emerge as a hybrid between these two types of conferences, in an attempt to provide their main benefits to the various participants. However, the insufficient literature on this topic calls for the need to develop and deepen studies in this area that allow understanding this academic and social, but also economic phenomenon, in its broader implications.publishersversionpublishe