This body of work is the culmination of a two year investigation into the role of electronically enhanced apparel and artefacts in providing empathetic linkage between people who do not share physical space. The research draws from the diverse fields of philosophy, communications theory, neuropsychology, presence technologies and technologically advanced textiles, and proposes that a nexus of these disciplines may provide significant opportunities for enhancing the user interactivity of garments and artefacts. Remote emotional connection is investigated through the creation of sensor embedded garments and artefacts that have been developed in collaboration with a fashion designer and an electronics engineer. The prototypes encourage remote empathetic connection through the real-time transference of heartbeat. The exegesis is structured into five chapters which consider remote presence, flexible consciousness, the architecture of empathy, plasticity in sense perception and the development of prototypes. The project chapter focuses in the development of and testing of a rnage of garments and artefacts thatt conduct presence information between remotely located people. The garments sense, process, transmit and receive the heartbeat signal (ECG). They are enabled with ECG sensors, signal processing equipment, small vibration motors and radio transceivers which allow users to 'feel' the heartbeat of a remote friend/lover/relative as vibration through their garment. The prototypes aim to enrich the remote communications experience through reintroducing an embodied, tactile dimension that is present in face-to-face communication. A range of user testing trials are discussed in the thesis which have been undertaken to assess the impact of the garments at a conscious and a non-conscious level. Conscious experiences were gauged through qualitative testing by way of interviews and unsolicited written reactions. Non-conscious physiological ractions were assessed by recording ECG throughout user-testing periods. This data has been processed by using HRV (heart rate variability) analysis software, running on MatLab.

To facilitate the emerging need for remote robot training and reach back, this thesis describes a system that allows for convenient web browser based robot operation over the Internet, while providing the means for recording and playback of all video, data and user actions. Training of first responder personnel on rescue robots is hindered by the fact that these devices are very expensive and are only affordable by a few specialized organizations that make them available by request at the time of a disaster. The system described in this thesis will allow first responders to practice on the robots without having to be physically present at same location. Having these capabilities of remote presence, the system can also be used in a real world response to transmit robot video and data to persons not present at the site of the incident, such as structural engineers or medical doctors. The recording capability will be used as an aid during training and to help resolve accountability issues in the real world scenario. Similar demands in the area of network video surveillance are met by the use of a network DVR that records and relays video and controls between IP cameras and Internet clients. The server implemented in this thesis is unique in that it extends these capabilities to include data from various robot sensors. All of the mentioned above video, data, and controls are combined into a convenient web browser based graphical user interface. The server was implemented and tested using rescue robots, but could be tailored to any other distributed robot architecture where reliable and convenient web browser based robot operation over the Internet is desired. System testing validated server capabilities of remote multi user robot operation, as well as its unique ability to store and play back external camera view along with robot video and data, to help with situation awareness. Conclusions drawn from the experiments indicate that this system can indeed be used for Internet robot training, as well as for other robotics research such as bandwidth regulation techniques or human-robot interaction studies by non computer science researchers who do not have physical access to robots.

Real-time, virtual and mixed reality systems have diverse uses for real-world data visualization, representation, and remote collaboration in distant learning settings, especially in universities. Design of such systems involves challenges in mapping the real world data and physical world structure accurately to digital form of physical space, also called as virtual models. Researchers have created similar systems using multiple cameras, stereo cameras, accelerometers, and motion detectors. This report presents a platform to detect and track real-time locations of people present in buildings and map their location information into virtual models as avatars using omni-directional cameras installed in the physical space. These models were created as part of the Mirror Worlds project. The project infrastructure is funded by National Science Foundation. This infrastructure enables users to connect virtual and physical aspects of the environment through a coordinate-based data networking system to enable interaction with the rest of the system including environment objects and other users. This is an interdisciplinary project where students from various departments have worked on the development of virtual model of the Moss Art Center and Torgersen Hall in Unity / X3D. Some students from the Department of Computer Science have developed a coordinate-based data networking system. The prototype of a detection and tracking algorithm to extract the location information was developed using background subtraction in MATLAB. The proposed approach was developed using the combination of background subtraction and neural networks along with heuristics based on spatial information about the physical space. The system was scaled to work across multiple buildings, extract the location information of people present in the physical space, and map location information into shared virtual space as an avatar. The concept of remote presence was extended to create a collaborative object manipulation application using Leap Motion controller. Effects of fidelity were evaluated to perform the collaborative object manipulation task in shared virtual space based on user study conducted for this application. Since no annotated people video dataset is publicly available with overhead view from omni-directional cameras, three videos were annotated manually to test the performance of the approach. The current approach almost works at near real-time rates. All three video sequences were evaluated to compute frame based detection accuracy. Precision and recall obtained for the first video sequence of people detection is 93.85% and 95.06% respectively. / Master of Science

Das Medizinische Interprofessionelle Trainingszentrum (MITZ) ist ein Skills Lab, in welchem Studierende (ST) praktische und kommunikative Kompetenzen für ihren späteren Berufsalltag erlernen. Bedingt durch die COVID-19-Pandemie musste sich das MITZ mit neuen Möglichkeiten der Teilhabe an der Lehre auseinandersetzen (Röhle, 2021) und pilotierte dies mit der Anschaffung von zwei Telepräsenzrobotern (TPR). TPR sind mobile Remote-Präsenz-Systeme, welche neben der klassischen Videokonferenz den ST zusätzlich die Möglichkeit geben, sich autonom zu bewegen (Wolff & Möller, 2021). Dadurch wird die informelle Kommunikation und der Austausch unterstützt (Lee & Takayama, 2011), deren Fehlen ST während des Studiums in Zeiten der COVID-19-Pandemie als besonders herausfordernd empfunden haben (Traus et al., 2020). Im Folgenden wird die Pilotierung des Einsatzes von Telepräsenzrobotern in der medizinischen Lehre vorgestellt. [Aus: Hintergrund]

This thesis is a contribution to design-led research and addresses a readership in the fields of architecture as well as in media and communications. In juxtaposing the tools of the designer (e.g. drafting, prototyping, visual/textual/spatial forms of montage) with those of architectural theory, this thesis seeks to extend the disciplinary boundaries of architecture by observing its assimilation of other media practices. Its primary contribution is to architectural design and theory, and its aims are twofold: Firstly, this thesis applies the concepts of virtual and mediated space to architecture, proposing an extended architectural practice that assimilates the concept of remote presence. Through realized design examples as well as through the history and theory of related concepts, the thesis explores what designing mediated spaces and designing for presence entails for the practicing architect. As a fusion of architecture and media technology, video-mediated spaces facilitate collaborative practices across spatial extensions while simultaneously fostering novel and environmentally sustainable modes of communication. The impact of presence design on workplace design is examined. As an extended practice also calls for an extended discourse, a preliminary conceptual toolbox is proposed. Concepts are adapted from related visual practices and tested on design prototypes, which arise from the author’s extensive experience in designing work and learning spaces. Secondly, this thesis outlines presence design as a transdisciplinary aesthetic practice and discusses the potential contribution of architects to a currently heterogeneous research field, which spans media space research, cognitive science, (tele)presence research, interaction design, ubiquitous computing, second-order cybernetics, and computer-supported collaborative work. In spite of such diversity, design and artistic practices are insufficiently represented in the field. This thesis argues that presence research and its discourse is characterised by sharp disciplinary boundaries and thereby identifies a conceptual gap: presence research typically fails to integrate aesthetic concepts that can be drawn from architecture and related visual practices. It is an important purpose of this thesis to synthesize such concepts into a coherent discourse. Finally, the thesis argues that remote presence through the proposed synthesis of architectural and technical design creates a significantly expanded potential for knowledge sharing across time and space, with potential to expand the practice and theory of architecture itself. The author’s design-led research shows that mediated spaces can provide sufficient audiovisual information about the remote space(s) and other person(s), allowing the subtleties of nonverbal communication to inform the interaction. Further, in designing for presence, certain spatial features have an effect on the user’s ability to experience a mediated spatial extension, which in turn, facilitates mediated presence. These spatial features play an important role in the process through which trust is negotiated, and hence has an impact on knowledge sharing. Mediated presence cannot be ensured by design, but by acknowledging the role of spatial design in mediated spaces, the presence designer can monitor and, in effect, seek to reduce the ‘friction’ that otherwise may inhibit the experience of mediated presence. The notion of ‘friction’ is borrowed from a context of knowledge sharing in collaborative work practices. My expanded use of the term ‘design friction’ is used to identify spatial design features which, unaddressed, may be said to impose friction and thus inhibit and impact negatively on the experience of presence. A conceptual tool-box for presence design is proposed, consisting of the following design concepts: mediated gaze, spatial montage, active spectatorship, mutual gaze, shared mediated space, offscreen space, lateral and peripheral awareness, framing and transparency. With their origins in related visual practices these emerge from the evolution of the concept of presence across a range of visual cultures, illuminating the centrality of presence design in design practice, be it in the construction of virtual pictorial space in Renaissance art or the generative design experiments of prototypical presence designers, such as Cedric Price, Gordon Pask and numerous researchers at MIT Media Lab, Stanford Institute and Xerox PARC. / QC 20100909