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This article describes design challenges of a novel concept enabling natural and intuitive video-mediated collaboration. Typical video-mediated communication systems do not enable deictic gestures nor direct drawing with white board markers, thus limiting communication. We present our novel concept for Natural and Intuitive Video-mediated Collaboration (NIVMC). NIVMC was originally developed for design professionals to enable co-operative sketching, but it may also benefit other user groups.

Virtual Reality leads Digital Product Development technology to a more effective and convenient way by presenting the product model in an immersive real 3D environment. Distributed VR even enables partners to discuss the design of the product independent of their locations. This paper introduces our work with a Digital Product Development System with Virtually Cooperating Teams Using High Bandwidth Networks — ProViT, which aims at building up immersive telepresence systems for design review across high-bandwidth networks. Video and audio streaming are integrated in the virtual environment to support immersive teleconference aspects of the distributed design review sessions. A network management system has been developed for the supervision, maintenance and processing of distributed setups, and network security.

Telexistence is fundamentally a concept named for the technology that enables a human being to have a real-time sensation of being at a place other than where he or she actually is, and to interact with the remote environment, which may be real, virtual, or a combination of both. It also refers to an advanced type of teleoperation system that enables an operator at the controls to perform remote tasks dexterously with the feeling of existing in a surrogate robot. Although conventional telexistence systems provide an operator the real-time sensation of being in a remote environment, persons in the remote environment have only the sensation that a surrogate robot is present, not the operator. Mutual telexistence aims to solve this problem so that the existence of the operator is apparent to persons in the remote environment by providing mutual sensations of presence. This paper proposes a method of mutual telexistence using projection technology with retro-reflective objects, and describes experimental hardware constructed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.

A humanoid is a robot that looks like a human (it has human shape, with a trunk, two arms, two legs and a head) and has been specially designed to act like a human being. This paper presents the procedures and results of a series of tests consisting of the reproduction of some target humanoid movements (walking, sitting, standing up, etc.) by a 4-DOF spherical motion base. In this way, an operator seated on the motion base will be able to feel the movements of the humanoid, creating a feeling of teleexistence. This paper contributes to the improvement and development of the teleexistence/telepresence technology applied to humanoid research.

We evaluate the ability of locally present participants to localize an avatar head’s gaze direction rapidly in hosted telepresence. We performed a controlled user study to test two potential solutions to indicate a remote user’s gaze. We analyze the influence of the user’s distance to the avatar and display technique on localization accuracy. Furthermore, we examine the effect of the avatar head’s rotation around the pitch and yaw axes on the localization accuracy. Our experimental results suggest that all these factors have a significant effect on the localization accuracy with different extent. The results also verified that people had a better perceptive and localizing ability when interacting with a 3D AR-displayed avatar. In addition, participants preferred to interact with a 3D avatar displayed using a simulated AR technique instead of with a 2D avatar displayed in a tablet because of its high realism. Our findings motivate the need for 3D avatar display in the further design of telepresence systems.

Telexistence refers to the general technology that allows humans to experience the real-time sensation of being in another place, interacting with a remote environment, which may be real, virtual, or a combination of both. It also refers to an advanced type of teleoperation system that allows an operator behind the controls to perform remote tasks dexterously with the feeling of being in a surrogate robot working in a remote environment. Telexistence in a real environment through a virtual environment is also possible. The concept was originally proposed by the first author in 1980, and its feasibility has been demonstrated through the construction of alter-ego robot systems called Telexistence Surrogate Anthropomorphic Robot (TELESAR) I–V. TELESAR VI is a newly developed telexistence platform for the ACCEL Embodied Media Project. It was designed and implemented with a mechanically unconstrained full-body master cockpit and a 67 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) anthropomorphic avatar robot. The avatar robot can operate in a sitting position since the main area of operation is intended to be manipulation and gestural. The system provides a full-body experience of our extended “body schema,” which allows users to maintain an up-to-date representation in space of the positions of their different body parts, including their head, torso, arms, hands, and legs. All ten fingers of the avatar robot are equipped with force, vibration, and temperature sensors and can faithfully transmit these elements of haptic information. Thus, the combined use of the robot and audiovisual information actualizes the remote sense of existence, as if the users physically existed there, with the avatar robot serving as their new body. With this experience, users can perform tasks dexterously and feel the robot’s body as their own, which provides the most simple and fundamental experience of a remote existence.

We study how mixed reality (MR) telepresence can enhance long-distance human interaction and how altering 3D representations of a remote person can be used to modulate stress and anxiety during social interactions. To do so, we developed an MR telepresence system employing commodity depth sensors and Microsoft’s Hololens. A textured, polygonal 3D model of a person was reconstructed in real time and transmitted over network for rendering in remote location using HoloLens. In this study, we used mock job interview paradigm to induce stress in human–subjects interacting with an interviewer presented as an MR hologram. Participants were exposed to three different types of real-time reconstructed virtual holograms of the interviewer, a natural-sized 3D reconstruction (NR), a miniature 3D reconstruction (SR) and a 2D-display representation (LCD). Participants reported their subjective experience through questionnaires, while their biophysical responses were recorded. We found that the size of 3D representation of a remote interviewer had a significant effect on participants’ stress levels and their sense of presence. The questionnaire data showed that NR condition induced more stress and presence than SR condition and was significantly different from LCD condition. We also found consistent patterns in the biophysical data.

The increasing use of robots working together with humans has stressed the importance of research in human-robot interaction where the robot is seen as a team member. This paper investigates the human-centric characteristics of situational awareness, telepresence and workload and how these affect the overall performance in a task which a human is teleoperating a simulated robot system in the critical domain of urban search and rescue. We present an overview of some new methods being developed by the authors together with performance metrics that can be used to assess the effectiveness of the human-robot interactions proposed. The experimental results, from a set of users consisting of professional paramedic rescuers, has shown that situation awareness and telepresence affect to some extent performance. Bivariate regression models were also shown to better predict performance than simply using a mean and error model. Workload, which was also hypothesised to affect performance, was shown to have no effect in the end.

This paper describes a system which is used to project musicians from two or more co-located venues into a shared virtual acoustic space. The sound of the musicians is captured using near-field microphones and a microphone array to localize the sounds. Afterwards, the near-field microphone signals are projected at the remote ends using spatialization software based on Virtual Microphone Control (ViMiC) and an array of loudspeakers. In order to simulate the same virtual room at all co-located sites, the ViMiC systems communicate using the Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol to exchange room parameters and the room coordinates of the musicians. Using OSC they also receive localization data from the microphone arrays.

Virtual reality, a new paradigm for relationship between humans and computers, has been recently well-known and currently investigated for practical use in the various industrial fields. Using three-dimensional computer graphics, interactive devices, and high-resolution display, a virtual world can be realized in which one can pick up imaginary objects as if they were physical world. Using this technology, Matsushita Electric Works, Ltd. has been developing several application systems for industrial use since 1990. This paper details three VR application systems operating in the real world: Virtual Space Decision Support System employing Kansei Engineering which is applied for production and sales mainly in the system kitchen business, a telepresence robot system employing semi-autonomous mobile function which is utilized for security field and a low-cost VR system employing physiological feedback mechanism which is used for health care field.