Open Collections

Ghimire, Amit

University of British Columbia

In robot-mediated telepresence, the teleoperator's physical embodiment enhances social interaction with on-site users. Current user representation techniques may result in disparities between the robotic embodiment and the teleoperator's representation, resulting in perceptual dissonance in on-site users which can degrade the interaction quality. To address this dissonance felt by on-site users, we introduce AvatARoid, a novel system that emphasizes the teleoperator's embodiment by superimposing a motion-mapped AR overlay of the teleoperator’s avatar on a humanoid robot. To assess the conceptual validity of AvatARoid, we implemented our system with a virtual robot in a realistic AR simulation carefully designed to maximize the sense of co-presence with the virtual robot. Since our evaluation focused on the different visual representations of the teleoperator, we designed the appearance and behavior of the virtual robot in our simulation to appear visually plausible and realistic within the experimental environment when augmented with different representations of the teleoperator. We conducted a mixed-method between-participants study (n=48) where participants engaged in a "get-to-know-you'' conversation followed by a word guessing game with a confederate teleoperator, represented as a virtual humanoid robot with (a) only the voice of the teleoperator (b) voice and video, or (c) AvatARoid. Our findings suggest that the AvatARoid system significantly improved the on-site user's perceived embodiment of the teleoperator compared to other conditions, particularly enhancing the sense that the teleoperator was situated in the same location as the robot and adding confidence that the teleoperator was in control of the robot. Additionally, AvatARoid allowed for more expressive non-verbal gestures, leading to engaging interactions. In contrast, the video and baseline conditions often resulted in on-site users feeling a pronounced disconnect between the teleoperator and the robot. Our study offers new insights into conceptualizing and evaluating novel user representation techniques to promote social interaction in robot-mediated telepresence systems.

Text

2023-12-06

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86769

Computer Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/