Bridging the Socio-Technical Gaps in Body-worn Interpersonal Live-Streaming Telepresence through a Critical Review of the Literature

DOI

It is important to learn from the past as we endeavor into this uncharted territory of mobile human-to-human telepresence for interpersonal use. With the ever-increasing access to live-streaming cameras, we are now at the cusp of being able to create novel, immersive, and interpersonal telepresence activities that have the potential to change how humans interact with one another on a daily basis. Due to its novelty, there are likely socio-technical gaps between the needs of users and the technical specifications of the prototypes that are currently being designed to support the complex social interactions of human-to-human telepresence. Therefore, in this paper, we use a socio-technical lens to conduct a systematic literature review of 51 peer-reviewed articles of early work in this space. Overall, we found that while progress has been made to address the social needs of those involved in telepresence scenarios, there are discontinuities within the existing literature that need to be addressed, particularly with the way we attempt to measure and quantify human-centered outcomes with unvalidated instruments. We also found that the social needs of human streamers have been neglected, as in many articles the streamer was merely treated as a surrogate, or reported feeling socially awkward or unsafe, due to the conspicuous nature of the body-worn technology in public environments. These findings are prevalent, even as researchers consider adding to this body-worn burden in an attempt to improve the viewer’s sense of immersion and presence. To preserve the beneficial nature of telepresence interaction while ensuring that all users’ needs are met, researchers should endeavor to further understand the dynamics of the relationship between the viewer, the streamer, and third parties in the remote environment. Our paper creates a future research agenda that emphasizes the importance of ensuring that all parties involved feel comfortable in their role during interpersonal telepresence interactions.