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Communication technologies are becoming increasingly diverse in form and functionality, making it important to identify which aspects of these technologies actually improve geographically distributed communication. Our study examines two potentially important aspects of communication technologies which appear in robot-mediated communication - physical embodiment and control of this embodiment. We studied the impact of physical embodiment and control upon interpersonal trust in a controlled laboratory experiment using three different videoconferencing settings: (1) a handheld tablet controlled by a local user, (2) an embodied system controlled by a local user, and (3) an embodied system controlled by a remote user (n = 29 dyads). We found that physical embodiment and control by the local user increased the amount of trust built between partners. These results suggest that both physical embodiment and control of the system influence interpersonal trust in mediated communication and have implications for future system designs.
Rae et al. (Sat,) studied this question.