Everyday face-to-face social interaction is increasingly being supplemented by computer- and video-mediated communication. With mediation, however, comes the potential loss of important non-verbal cues. It is therefore important to attempt to maintain the quality of the mediated interaction, such that it retains as many of the aspects of a real-world interaction as possible. Social presence is a measure of how similar a mediated interaction is to face-to-face, the most socially present situation, in terms of perceptions of and behaviour towards an interlocutor. Social presence can be mediated by many factors, one of which is mutual gaze, and social perceptions of an interlocutor are also thought to be related to task performance. For a successful interaction, therefore, an optimum amount of mutual gaze for maximising social presence and task performance is desirable. This research aims to investigate the relationship between mutual gaze, task performance and social presence, in order to discover the ideal conditions under which a successful mediated interaction can occur. Previous gaze research paradigms have involved one conversational partner staring continuously at the other, and the resulting mutual gaze being measured. It is hypothesised that this method may actually suppress mutual gaze, primarily due to social reasons. It is potentially, therefore, not the optimum experimental design for mutual gaze research. The first study in this thesis used eye-tracking to explore this hypothesis and investigate the relationship between mutual gaze and task performance. A suitable paradigm was developed, based on that used in previous research into eye movements and non-verbal communication. Two participants – Instruction Giver (IG) and Instruction Follower (IF) – communicated via avatars in Second Life to solve simple arithmetic tasks. There were two between-participant looking conditions: staring (the IG’s avatar stared continuously at the IF); and notstaring, (IG’s avatar looked at IF and task-relevant objects). Constant staring did, indeed, show evidence of decreasing mutual gaze within the dyad. Mutual gaze was positively correlated with task performance scores, but only in the not-staring condition. When not engaged in mutual gaze, the IF looked more at task-related objects in the not-staring condition than in the staring condition; this suggests that social factors are likely to be driving the gaze aversion in the staring condition. Furthermore, there are no task-related benefits to staring. The second study explored further how much looking by one person at another will maximise both mutual gaze and task performance between the dyad. It also investigated the relationship between mutual gaze, task performance and both manipulated and perceived social presence. Individual participants interacted with a virtual agent within the Second Life paradigm previously used in the human-human study. Participants were either told they were interacting with a computer (i.e. an agent) or another human (an avatar). This provided the between-participants manipulated social presence variable, or agency. The virtual agent was programmed to look at the participant during either 0%, 25%, 50% or 75% of the interaction, providing the within-participants variable looking condition. The majority of effects were found in the 75% looking condition, including the highest mutual gaze uptake and the highest social presence ratings (measured via a questionnaire). Although the questionnaire did not detect any differences in social presence between the agent and avatar condition, participants were significantly faster to complete the tasks in the avatar condition than in the agent condition. This suggests that behavioural measures may be more effective at detecting differences in social presence than questionnaires alone. The results are discussed in relation to different theories of social interaction. Implications and limitations of the findings are considered and suggestions for future work are made.

Today, video communication is common in private and professional communication, and during corona pandemic 2020, its use has increased significantly. This has raised the issue on the fact that video communication is not as perceived as natural as a face-to-face conversation, and the lack of eye contact can be a contributing cause. This study has developed and evaluated a video communication design where it was possible for users to have eye contact. It was also possible to manipulate the camera position. The aim of the study was to evaluate the usefulness of the design in research on eye contact, which gave the opportunity to also investigate how this affects the experience of the conversation. The study also investigated how the self-view affects experience of conversations. Twelve persons participated in the study. After a relaxed conversation, a semi-structured interview was conducted on how they experienced the different camera angles. The participants eye movements were also recorded. The result shows a significant and consistent perceived difference between different camera positions. The usual camera position with 15° decentration felt familiar and the extreme decentration of 45° position felt unreal and abnormal. When given the opportunity for eye contact, the participants felt significantly more present in the conversation with increased sense of reality. The Self-view was perceived as an obstacle to feel present, but gave a sense of control. These results are discussed in relation to the need to adapt video communication to social processes and its biological origin, e.g. the eyes function for we-ness and the implication of seeing oneself during conversations.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the reactions people experienced when engaged in extended eye contact with a stranger. Artist Marina Abramović and an organization entitled The Liberators International have demonstrated a spectrum of reactions, many emotionally-charged, that have occurred from the opportunity to sit across from and gaze into the eyes of a stranger. Current research on eye contact has been predominantly quantitative, with no available research that qualitatively investigates the scenario in focus. The design of this study involved interviewing 35 people who participated in "The World’s Biggest Eye Contact Experiment," where individuals paired with a partner and gazed into each other's eyes for one minute. The data revealed a significant overlap between negative and positive face, where individuals sought out the experience in order to exceed their comfort zones and to foster connections with other people. Participants reported feeling a sense of vulnerability, which was attributed to civil inattention and the simultaneous threat to and expansion of negative face.

This thesis is a contribution to design-led research and addresses a readership in the fields of architecture as well as in media and communications. In juxtaposing the tools of the designer (e.g. drafting, prototyping, visual/textual/spatial forms of montage) with those of architectural theory, this thesis seeks to extend the disciplinary boundaries of architecture by observing its assimilation of other media practices. Its primary contribution is to architectural design and theory, and its aims are twofold: Firstly, this thesis applies the concepts of virtual and mediated space to architecture, proposing an extended architectural practice that assimilates the concept of remote presence. Through realized design examples as well as through the history and theory of related concepts, the thesis explores what designing mediated spaces and designing for presence entails for the practicing architect. As a fusion of architecture and media technology, video-mediated spaces facilitate collaborative practices across spatial extensions while simultaneously fostering novel and environmentally sustainable modes of communication. The impact of presence design on workplace design is examined. As an extended practice also calls for an extended discourse, a preliminary conceptual toolbox is proposed. Concepts are adapted from related visual practices and tested on design prototypes, which arise from the author’s extensive experience in designing work and learning spaces. Secondly, this thesis outlines presence design as a transdisciplinary aesthetic practice and discusses the potential contribution of architects to a currently heterogeneous research field, which spans media space research, cognitive science, (tele)presence research, interaction design, ubiquitous computing, second-order cybernetics, and computer-supported collaborative work. In spite of such diversity, design and artistic practices are insufficiently represented in the field. This thesis argues that presence research and its discourse is characterised by sharp disciplinary boundaries and thereby identifies a conceptual gap: presence research typically fails to integrate aesthetic concepts that can be drawn from architecture and related visual practices. It is an important purpose of this thesis to synthesize such concepts into a coherent discourse. Finally, the thesis argues that remote presence through the proposed synthesis of architectural and technical design creates a significantly expanded potential for knowledge sharing across time and space, with potential to expand the practice and theory of architecture itself. The author’s design-led research shows that mediated spaces can provide sufficient audiovisual information about the remote space(s) and other person(s), allowing the subtleties of nonverbal communication to inform the interaction. Further, in designing for presence, certain spatial features have an effect on the user’s ability to experience a mediated spatial extension, which in turn, facilitates mediated presence. These spatial features play an important role in the process through which trust is negotiated, and hence has an impact on knowledge sharing. Mediated presence cannot be ensured by design, but by acknowledging the role of spatial design in mediated spaces, the presence designer can monitor and, in effect, seek to reduce the ‘friction’ that otherwise may inhibit the experience of mediated presence. The notion of ‘friction’ is borrowed from a context of knowledge sharing in collaborative work practices. My expanded use of the term ‘design friction’ is used to identify spatial design features which, unaddressed, may be said to impose friction and thus inhibit and impact negatively on the experience of presence. A conceptual tool-box for presence design is proposed, consisting of the following design concepts: mediated gaze, spatial montage, active spectatorship, mutual gaze, shared mediated space, offscreen space, lateral and peripheral awareness, framing and transparency. With their origins in related visual practices these emerge from the evolution of the concept of presence across a range of visual cultures, illuminating the centrality of presence design in design practice, be it in the construction of virtual pictorial space in Renaissance art or the generative design experiments of prototypical presence designers, such as Cedric Price, Gordon Pask and numerous researchers at MIT Media Lab, Stanford Institute and Xerox PARC. / QC 20100909