Telepresence robots allow remote users to freely explore a space they are not in, and provide a physical embodiment in that space. However, they lack a compelling representation of the remote user in the local space. We present VROOM (Virtual Robot Overlay for Online Meetings), a two-way system for exploring how to improve the social experience of robotic telepresence. For the local user, an augmented-reality (AR) interface shows a life-size avatar of the remote user overlaid on a telepresence robot. For the remote user, a head-mounted virtual-reality (VR) interface presents an immersive 360° view of the local space with mobile autonomy. The VR system tracks the remote user’s head pose and hand movements, which are applied to the avatar. This allows the local user to see the remote’s head direction and hand gestures, and the remote user to identify with the robot as an identifiable embodiment of self.
Citation
Brennan Jones, Yaying Zhang, Priscilla N. Y. Wong, and Sean Rintel. 2020. VROOM: Virtual Robot Overlay for Online Meetings. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3382820
BibTeX
@inproceedings{jones2020vroom,
author = {Jones, Brennan and Zhang, Yaying and Priscilla Wong and Rintel, Sean},
title = {VROOM: Virtual Robot Overlay for Online Meetings},
organization = {ACM},
booktitle = {CHI 2020},
year = {2020},
month = {April},
url = {https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/vroom-virtual-robot-overlay-for-online-meetings/},
note = {CHI 2020 Extended Abstracts},
}
