An Experimental Video Conference Platform to Bridge the Gap Between Digital and In-Person Communication

With many contemporary video conferencing platforms available, there is still a need for platforms that afford a researcher workflow to conduct controlled online experiments. We have developed an open source experimental video conferencing platform that enables researchers to design and conduct remote experiments. Our platform provides a high level of control over the user interface and video streams, which is essential for studying the differences between remote and in-person social interactions. We give an overview of our platform's usage and architecture and conduct a take-home study (N=9) to evaluate how accessible our system is to potential new contributors. We also follow up with an initial evaluation of technical performance bottlenecks for when our experimental platform is deployed, and show that the computational resources increases per each video stream as well as the type of filters applied to each participant. We end with a short discussion on next steps and the experimental hub's potential to be extended as a sandbox for testing browser based augmented reality (WebAR) filters to be adopted in interdisciplinary experimental procedures.