Current video conferencing tools lack a sense of presence. Telepresence can improve the current video conferencing by providing feeling of presence at a different location from remote location. Most recent telepresence systems are built with the devices that are not accessible and uncomfortable for the daily meeting purpose. This work proposes a framework for embodied telepresence system that suits a daily meeting case the best.
Based on our new telepresence framework, a new system architecture and design requirements are constructed. The system architecture shows how the telepresence system needs to be structured, and a design requirement helps to understand the needs of the system. With this framework we were able to implement a user friendly and accessible telepresence system.
Our telepresence system enables users to control the telepresence robot with smartphone controller. The controller has four features: (1) Smartphone orientation control, (2) Position save and playback, (3) Local smart light bulb control, and (4) visual cue.
At the end, our work evaluates the developed telepresence system by measuring the performances of given tasks to the participants. The evaluation shows that our system provides a sense of presence to both remote and local users. However, the proposed telepresence framework and system requires farther improvements to provide better usability. / Master of Science / During the pandemic, video conferencing tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet showed the advantages of having meetings and working remotely. However, these tools do not provide a sense of presence and the necessary level of control of what can be seen from a remote user's point of view. Therefore, researchers investigated and developed various tools that can give remote users a sense of presence at a location where a face-to-face meeting is taking place. We call this a telepresence tool.
Our systematic review of the current telepresence tool results that most of the telepresence tools use devices that are not familiar and hard to access for general users. Additionally, they do not consider the local users feeling about remote user's presence at the face-to-face meeting (local site). Therefore, in this paper, we propose a general guideline or framework to help build a telepresence tool that overcomes the current telepresence tools' problems.
Our telepresence tool, developed based on our proposed framework, uses a smartphone to control the telepresence robot that represents a remote user at the local site. A remote user can control the local site light bulb, save the telepresence robot's position and place it back, and show the user is away or present at the meeting. The evaluation of our telepresence system shows that our system provides a sense of presence to both remote and local users
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/113646 |
| Date | 02 February 2023 |
| Creators | Park, Juwon |
| Contributors | Computer Science and Applications, Gracanin, Denis, Knapp, Richard Benjamin, Azab, Mohamed Mahmoud Mahmoud |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
Page generated in 0.0029 seconds