Consumer-based synchronous video communication is on the rise and is viewed as a valuable medium to support long distance relationships. We were interested in the potential of asynchronous video to augment children"s close friendships and what types of activities they would engage in using video. We explored both of these concepts through a 9-week field study with a group of six 9-10 year old girls. We see children as potential media trendsetters when it comes to video communication given their

more »

... comfort with video and desire for rich social interactions. The results from this study were striking. Despite having frequent faceto-face interactions, the girls used our asynchronous video communication tool extensively to augment their existing relationships. Not only were they able to have rich conversations using asynchronous video, they also demonstrated a strong desire to share more than just a "talking head". The results from this work point to the need for video mediated communication to move beyond conversations, to the sharing of rich experiences. H.5.3. Information interfaces and presentation: Group and Organization Interfaces. interactions. Finally, observations from this work indicate that asynchronous video is beneficial for more than just talking heads style conversations. Talking heads refers to the phenomenon that during video mediated conversations, the video typically only shows the participating parties heads and they primarily use the video to talk to each other. The girls in our study used video for a wide range of activities, which suggests that video conferencing needs to move beyond talking heads to enable sharing of many different types of experiences. We first begin with a discussion of related work, followed by a description of VideoPal, the asynchronous video communication tool used in this study. We then describe our field study along with the resulting observations. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results and important next steps. RELATED WORK Video Mediated Communication (VMC) can be either synchronous, such that partners can see each other at the same time, or asynchronous, where users view and respond to video messages at different times. There has been a great deal of research in the area of synchronous VMC to support distant relationships in both enterprise and home settings, however, there has been much less work exploring asynchronous VMC. Theoretical Foundations Children"s verbal communication abilities are typically less mature than adults because they have not mastered the necessary linguistic or cognitive competencies to help them communicate [17] . Nonverbal communication such as the use of gestures, body language, facial expressions, and voice expressions [14] has been shown to provide productive communication because facial and tone cues can convey effective emotional signals to eliminate confusion in conversations [8, 13] . This suggests that nonverbal communication would play an important role in children"s communication. Bruner [3] also suggested that knowledge begins with action, progresses towards iconic representations, and then can be expressed with language. Therefore mediums that leverage actions, body movement or imagery might be easier for children than text based communication such as email.