Development and Evaluation of Online Meeting System to Promote Effective Communication

Compared to face-to-face meetings, online meetings often make it difficult to read the intentions and thoughts of the others based on their facial expressions and the atmosphere of the place. Conventional online meeting systems are designed on the premise that the participants turn on the camera to show their own faces. We propose a remote meeting system that can convey the expression of the others through 2D avatars and 3D avatars that follows facial movements, in addition to visualizing opinions and the atmosphere of the meeting. We report on the evaluation of the performance of avatar display and the effectiveness of visualizing the atmosphere of a place and facial expressions through avatars, automatized votes, and visual reports.