Abstract
Space is an essential part of social communication. The distance individuals choose when communicating with each other conveys non-verbal information and social signals. In remote, audiovisual communication, though, spatial information is hardly considered in the technical set-ups, often arbitrary and unequally perceived by the participants. In this article, we describe an audiovisual communication system that takes distance into account. Based on a display equipped with depth sensors, we divide the space into different zones and use human position in the room to enable interaction between remote participants. This way, the physical availability of a communication partner is imitated and distance between individuals can be used naturally to convey non-verbal information in remote set-ups.