Heather Hyerin Im
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Virfie: Enhancing Remote Togetherness with User-Created Scenarios for Virtual Group Selfie 📸



Remote social interaction fundamentally alters how people perceive others’ bodies, emotions, and intentions. Conventional video grids fragment social cues and diminish collective embodied awareness, reshaping how closeness and belonging are cognitively and emotionally formed. 

Virfie explores how digital systems can recompose these cues - position, gesture, synchrony, shared attention - so that technology does not merely transmit communication but actively reorganizes the conditions under which social presence emerges. This work treats remote sociality as a cyborg condition: one where human perception and digital mediation co-construct the experience of “being together,” and where alternative computational arrangements may reveal new forms of collective embodiment and emotional attunement.  

Author
Heather Hyerin Im
Taewan Kim
Eunhee Jung
Bonhee Ku
Seungho Baek 
Younkyung Lim
Tekjin Nam
Takyeon Lee


My Role
1st author, design research, system development, participatory designPublished  














Motivation


Remote group selfies became a popular way for people to feel connected during the COVID-19 pandemic, yet existing video conferencing platforms were not designed to support social bonding or creative group interaction. 

Their grid-based layouts, limited expressiveness, information overload, and lack of shared spatial context make it difficult to build a sense of togetherness or engage in playful, embodied interaction. 

Moreover, little prior work has systematically explored the design space of online group selfies or how the selfie-taking process itself could enhance social presence. This gap motivates the development of a platform that enables dynamic layouts, gesture-based interaction, and narrative contexts for strengthening remote social connection.   


“Also, what if we could move beyond these constraints and leverage 
the advantages of digital environments to support remote togetherness?”


   







Approach


Participatory Design


We conducted a participatory design process to surface how people wish digital systems would reconstruct bodily cues, shared narratives, and micro-interactions that support social bonding - treating these desires as insights into the tacit mechanics of social cognition under mediation.

Through iterative open coding, the team distilled three core patterns that users consistently envisioned, and these patterns directly informed the design of Virfie.

    Sketches of various group selfie ideas








    Virfie System


    Virfie is a WebRTC-based web application that connects users in the same room through peer-to-peer video streaming, reducing server load. It uses WebSockets for real-time scenario updates, and the client extracts body parts from each video stream in real time using TensorFlow.js BodyPix.




    A typical scenario configuration of Virfie and how component layers are drawn to the main canvas. Each scene contains a number of properties including title, audio, users, overlays, triggers, and background.




    User Test


    After implementing Virfie, in order to validate our design concept and identify usability issues we conducted a user study.

    A user study examined how participants adapted their behaviors when the system augmented or remixed their bodies and expressions, revealing how digital cues can redirect attention, amplify social attunement, and create emergent forms of shared identity.



    Conclusion


    This work demonstrates the value of reimagining video-based communication beyond grid-constrained interfaces by introducing Virfie, a virtual group selfie platform designed to support embodied interaction, creative expression, and shared narrative contexts in remote settings. 

    Through participatory ideation, system development, and a user study, we show that dynamic compositing, gesture-triggered effects, and customizable scenarios can meaningfully enhance social presence and strengthen remote togetherness. 

    Participants used these capabilities not only to create playful and expressive group selfies but also to engage more attentively and emotionally with one another. These findings highlight the broader opportunity for communication technologies to move past static layouts and instead enable flexible, multisensory, and socially rich virtual environments. We argue that such designs can play a significant role in fostering connection and creativity in digitally mediated social experiences.



    CHI 2022