ReMotion: Supporting Remote Collaboration in Open Space with Automatic Robotic Embodiment
Published in Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2023
Mose Sakashita, Xiaoyi Li, Ruidong Zhang, Hyunju Kim, Michael Russo III, Malte F Jung, Cheng Zhang, and François Guimbretière. 2023. ReMotion: Supporting Remote Collaboration in Open Space with Automatic Robotic Embodiment. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23) (to appear).
Design activities, such as brainstorming or critique, often take place in open spaces combining whiteboards and tables to present artefacts. In co-located settings, peripheral awareness enables participants to understand each other’s locus of attention with ease. However, these spatial cues are mostly lost while using videoconferencing tools. Telepresence robots could bring back a sense of presence, but controlling them is distracting. To address this problem, we present ReMotion, a fully automatic robotic proxy designed to explore a new way of supporting non-collocated open-space design activities. ReMotion combines a commodity body tracker (Kinect) to capture a user’s location and orientation over a wide area with a minimally invasive wearable system (NeckFace) to capture facial expressions. Due to its omnidirectional platform, ReMotion embodiment can render a wide range of body movements. The formative evaluation indicates that our system enhances the sharing of attention and the sense of co-presence enabling seamless moving-in-space experience.
To appear soon.