Spatiality in Videoconferencing: Trade-offs between Efficiency and Social Presence

In this paper, we explore ways to combine the video of a remote person with a shared tabletop display to best emulate face-toface collaboration. Using a simple photo application we compare a variety of social and performance measures of collaboration when using two approaches for adding spatial cues to videoconferencing: one based on immersive 3D, the other based on traditional 2D video-planes. A Face-to-Face condition is included as a ‘gold-standard’ control. As expected, social presence and task measures were superior in the Face-to-Face condition, but there were important differences between the 2D and 3D interfaces. In particular, the 3D interface positively influenced socialand co-presence measures in comparison to 2D, but the task measures favored the two-dimensional interfaces.