MagHeart: Exploring Playful Avatar Co-Creation and Shared Heartbeats for Icebreaking in Hybrid Meetings
Black Sun, Haiyang Xu, Ge Kacy Fu, Liyue Da, Eve Hoggan

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,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsInnovative Human-Technology Interaction · Virtual Reality Applications and Impacts · AI in Service Interactions
