Abstract

In today's video conferencing systems, the ability to further customize participant experiences is often limited. Most platforms offer a uniform experience for all participants, which can be a constraint for research and experimentation environments that want to offer different experiences for participants. This thesis introduces the asymmetric filters feature to SynthARium, an open-source video conferencing platform for researchers, that allows experimenters to customize how each participant views and experiences a session. This feature allows experimenters to adjust the view of each participant to be unique to them by assigning different filters for the other participants they see in the experiment, resulting in more dynamic and customized video conferencing experiences. The implementation included a redesign of the participant details modal to incorporate the asymmetric filters feature, followed by frontend modifications to reflect the redesign and showcase the feature, and backend adjustments to support the asymmetric filters for participants during a session. The performance of the system was evaluated by monitoring and measuring the CPU utilization, memory consumption and network traffic under different experimental conditions. The results showed that while the asymmetric filters feature provides significant flexibility, it causes additional overhead in terms of CPU, memory, and network traffic compared to the default filters. However, this allows the experimenter to have more control over the session dynamics, enabling more effective management of complex participant interactions in the research context. This feature has important implications for research where differentiated participant experiences are important, especially in controlled experiments.

Results/Implementation/Project Description

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