Mose Sakashita

ReMotion: Supporting Remote Collaboration in Open Space with Automatic Robotic Embodiment

Mose Sakashita, Ruidong Zhang, Xiaoyi Li, Hyunju Kim, Michael Russo, Cheng Zhang, Malte F. Jung, François Guimbretière

2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems


Paper Video ACM DL

Abstract

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. A formative evaluation indicated that our system enhances the sharing of attention and the sense of co-presence enabling seamless movement-in-space during a design review task.

Mose Sakashita, Ruidong Zhang, Xiaoyi Li, Hyunju Kim, Michael Russo, Cheng Zhang, Malte F. Jung, François Guimbretière. 2023. ReMotion: Supporting Remote Collaboration in Open Space with Automatic Robotic Embodiment. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23). ACM, New York, NY, USA, . DOI: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3580699