MagHeart: Exploring Playful Avatar Co-Creation and Shared Heartbeats for Icebreaking in Hybrid Meetings

TL;DR

MagHeart introduces a playful, multimodal system using avatar co-creation and heartbeat cues to enhance social presence and engagement in hybrid meetings, addressing social awkwardness and asymmetric participation.

Contribution

This work presents a novel hybrid meeting tool combining tangible avatar creation and biofeedback to foster embodied interaction and social presence for remote participants.

Findings

Participants anticipated increased engagement with MagHeart.

The system enhanced perceived social presence during hybrid meetings.

Tensions around privacy and distraction were identified.

Abstract

Hybrid meetings often begin with social awkwardness and asymmetric participation, particularly for remote attendees who lack access to informal, co-present interaction. We present MagHeart, a multimodal system that explores symmetric icebreaking in hybrid meetings through playful LEGO-based avatar co-creation and a tangible magnetic device that represents a remote participant's heartbeat as an ambient presence cue. By combining creative co-creation with abstract bio-feedback, MagHeart rethinks how remote participants can become materially and perceptually present during meeting openings. We report findings from a scenario-based exploratory study combining quantitative and qualitative data, examining participants' anticipated engagement, perceived social presence, and future-use intentions from both co-located and remote perspectives. Our results highlight opportunities for playful, embodied icebreakers to support early hybrid interaction, while also surfacing tensions around privacy, distraction, and contextual appropriateness. This work contributes design insights and open questions for future hybrid meeting tools that balance playfulness, embodiment, and social sensitivity.