Holistic Framework for Quality Assessment of Mediated Social Communication

Modern immersive multisensory communication systems can provide compelling mediated social communication experiences that approach face-to-face (F2F) communication. Existing frameworks to assess the quality of mediated social communication experiences are typically targeted at specific communication technologies and do not address all relevant aspects of social presence (i.e., the feeling of being in the presence of, and having an affective and intellectual connection with, other persons). Also, they are typically unsuitable for application to social communication in virtual (VR), augmented (AR) or mixed (MR) reality. Here we present a comprehensive and general holistic mediated social communication (H-MSC) framework and associated questionnaire (the H-MSC-Q) for measuring the quality of mediated social communication. The H-MSC framework comprises both the experience of Spatial Presence (i.e., the perceived fidelity, internal and external plausibility, and cognitive, reasoning and behavioral affordances of an environment) and the experience of Social Presence (i.e., perceived mutual proximity, intimacy, credibility, reasoning and behavior of the communication partners). Since social presence is inherently bidirectional (involving a sense of mutual awareness) the H-MSC-Q distinguishes between the internal (‘own’) and external (‘the other’) assessment perspectives. The H-MSC-Q is efficient and parsimonious, using only a single item to tap into each of the relevant processing levels in the human brain: sensory, emotional, cognitive, reasoning, and behavioral. It is also sufficiently general to measure social presence experienced with any (including VR, AR, and MR) type of multi-sensory (visual, auditory, haptic, and olfactory) mediated communication system.