Video-mediated communication systems attempt to provide users with a channel that could bring out the “feeling” of face-to-face communication. Among the many qualities these systems aim for, a high level of Social Presence is unquestionably a desirable one; however, little effort has been made to improve upon the user's perception of “presence”. We propose an AR approach to enhance social presence for video-mediated systems by allowing one user to be present in the other user's video image. By using one extra camera on both sides, our system captures and merges the hand image from/to both sides resulting in an augmented experience where each user can “reach” to the other user's world. We conducted a preliminary pilot study with 10 participants coupled in 5 pairs in order to evaluate our system compared to the traditional video-chat setup. Tasks with varying equality of roles for the participants were performed. Results indicated that our system has higher degree of social presence compared to traditional video-chat systems. This conclusion was supported by the positive feedback from the subjects.
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