Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : International Conference on Design and Concurrent Engineering 2023 & Manufacturing Systems Conference 2023
Date : September 01, 2023 - September 02, 2023
Pandemic of COVID-19 accelerated usage of various online communication tools including video conference software, and Metaverse applications. But it is not clear that what are characteristics of communication performed in each online communication environment. Especially, research of comparing nonverbal communication between different environments is not enough. It is supposed that adapting nonverbal behaviors to the online communication environment can enhance facilitate effective communication among collaborative employers, such as engaging engineering works. This paper aims to reveal characteristics of communication in video conference and metaverse environment by comparing them. The experiment was conducted to observe how subjects perform gestures using card game which is playable on the web browser. Subjects are assigned to two groups, video conference and metaverse environment. Video conference environment group used Zoom as communication tool, and metaverse group were in 3D virtual reality space created by Unity, wearing Meta Quest 2. Parameters to measure the characteristics of communication are number of the gestures per second, percentage of gesture time per second, and average duration of gestures, for hands and head respectively. In addition, gestures of hand are used as information transmission gesture, and gestures of head is used as responding gesture. The result shows that comparing two environment groups, the video conference environment group had more responding gestures, while the metaverse environment group had more information transmitting gestures.
