Presentation Method for Conveying Nonverbal Information in Online Conference Presentations with a Virtual Stage

The recent spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) has meant that online conference presentations are becoming more and more frequent at national and international level. We believe that these online presentations will remain an option even after the pandemic has subsided. One of the challenges of online conference presentations is that it is difficult to convey nonverbal information such as gestures and the facial expressions of the presenter. In this paper, we propose the "Stage-like PresentationMethod", which involves projecting the whole body, and investigates how the presence or absence of nonverbal information from the presenter affects the audience. A comparison of the proposed method with two other presentation methods confirmed that the audience considered it the most effective. The method was used by seven people in actual conference presentations, and it was found that the audience's impressions changed according to the details of the setting. This research confirmed that the Stage-like Presentation Method left the audience at online conferences with a good impression of presentations. It also suggests that audiences find visual nonverbal information useful.