We conducted a co-design study with 26 users in dyadic groups who were assigned to the opposing roles of "Streamers'' and "Viewers'' to design interactive, wearable telepresence prototypes for interpersonal use. The goal was to elicit values, identify value tensions, and resolve these tensions in the design of a system that allows Streamers to share their live experiences with a remote Viewer. Leveraging the lens of value-sensitive design (VSD), we found that these different stakeholders prioritized different values in design, but possibly due to our prompt to design for someone they cared about/knew, often accounted for one another's needs in their solutions to arrive at designs that were affordable, unobtrusive, and socially acceptable for the Streamer, while giving the Viewer a sense of autonomy. Our work highlights the strengths of co-design when eliciting important human values in the design of sociotechnical systems for wearable telepresence, reconciling value tensions, and conceptualizing novel hardware- and software-based solutions for enhancing the interpersonal telepresence experience of both viewers and streamers. A key insight from our study is that no single system will meet all users' needs; therefore, we should move towards building customizable toolkits to account for differing values and needs.

We developed and deployed an interpersonal telepresence prototype aimed at providing a positive one-to-one interaction between a Streamer and a Viewer. Our prototype uses four distributed, wearable cameras hidden from the public eye. It was designed to reduce the risk of Streamer self-consciousness while providing the Viewer with a greater sense of autonomy. We deployed our prototype with sixteen participants in dyads, who worked together to complete a scavenger hunt, and compared it the baseline of Skype. We found how our prototype better supported Streamer social well-being and physical comfort, and it also better supported Viewer autonomy. However, almost all participants desired a change to the design of the prototype, hinting that we need to provide better customization for future iterations of interpersonal telepresence devices.

We performed a mixed-design study with 56 participants to compare the effect of horizontal FOV (hfov) and vertical FOV (vfov) on egocentric distance perception in four different realistic virtual environments (VEs). We also compared VE attributes of indoor/outdoor and cluttered/uncluttered. The participants blind-walked towards four different targets at 3m, 4m, 5m, and 6m distance while wearing a backpack computer and a wide FOV head-mounted display (HMD). The combinations of 165°, 110° and 45° hfovs, and 110° and 35° vfovs was simulated in the same HMD. The results indicated more accurate distance judgement with larger hfov with no significant effect of vfov. More accurate distance judgement in indoor VEs compared to outdoor VEs was observed. Also, participants judged distances more accurately in cluttered environments versus uncluttered environments. These results highlight that the environment is important in distance-critical VR applications and wider hfov should be considered for an improved distance judgment.

In recent years, pass-through cameras have resurfaced as inclusions for virtual reality (VR) hardware. With modern cameras that now have increased resolution and frame rate, Video See-Through (VST) Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) can be used to provide an Augmented Reality (AR) experience. However, because users see their surroundings through video capture and HMD lenses, there is question surrounding how people perceive their environment with these devices. We conducted a user study with 26 participants to help understand if distance perception is altered when viewing surroundings with a VST HMD. Although previous work shows that distance estimation in VR with an HTC Vive is comparable to that in the real world, our results show that the inclusion of a ZED Mini pass-through camera causes a significant difference between normal, unrestricted viewing and that through a VST HMD.

It is important to learn from the past as we endeavor into this uncharted territory of mobile, human-to-human, one-to-one telepresence for interpersonal use. With the ever-increasing access to live-streaming cameras, we are now at the cusp of being able to create novel, immersive, and interpersonal telepresence activities that have the potential to change how humans interact with one another on a daily basis. Due to its novelty, there are likely socio-technical gaps between the needs of users and the technical specifications of the prototypes that are currently being designed to support the complex social interactions of human-to-human telepresence. Therefore, in this paper, we use a socio-technical lens to conduct a systematic literature review of 52 peer-reviewed articles of early work in this space. Overall, we found that while progress has been made to address the social needs of those involved in one-to-one telepresence scenarios, there are discontinuities within the existing literature that need to be addressed, particularly with the way we attempt to measure and quantify human-centered outcomes with unvalidated instruments. We also found that the social needs of on-site users have been neglected, as in many articles the user was merely treated as a surrogate, or reported feeling socially awkward or unsafe, due to the conspicuous nature of the body-worn technology in public environments. These findings are prevalent, even as researchers consider adding to this body-worn burden in an attempt to improve the receiving users' sense of immersion and presence. To preserve the beneficial nature of telepresence interaction while ensuring that all users' needs are met, researchers should endeavor to further understand the dynamics of the relationship between all parties in the remote environment. Our paper creates a future research agenda that emphasizes the importance of ensuring that all parties involved feel comfortable in their role during interpersonal telepresence interactions.

With the rise of immersive virtual reality and telepresence, it is important to understand the factors that contribute to creating an optimal user experience. In particular, there are divergent recommendations for setting camera heights in virtual contexts that facilitate telepresence. Therefore, we conducted a 2x2 mixed-design experiment with 93 college students asking them to select their preferred camera height when varying camera placement (overhead, chest) and the presence of human avatars (present, not present). We found that while camera placement did not have a significant effect of preferred camera height, the presence of avatars (increased height preference) and gender (women preferred lower heights) were significant. Our results provide evidence that factors within a virtual environment and individual differences influence users’ preferences of camera height. Thus, systems designed for immersive virtual reality and telepresence should customize camera height based on these factors.

Our work investigates body-worn 360° camera placements for telepresence, to balance height and clarity of view. We conducted a user study in a Virtual Reality (VR) simulation, using a 3x3 within-subjects experimental design varying placement and height, with 26 participants. We found that shoulder mounted cameras were significantly less preferable than our other conditions due to the occlusions caused by the wearer’s head. Our results did not show a significant effect of camera height within a range of +/- 12 inches from the user’s natural height. As such, in the context of body-worn 360° cameras, there is leeway for camera height, whereas strategic bodily placements are more important. Based on these results, we provide design recommendations for content creators using wearable cameras for immersive telepresence.

Past research has shown that humans exhibit certain eye-head responses to the appearance of visual stimuli, and these natural reactions change during different activities. Our work builds upon these past observations by offering new insight to how humans behave in Virtual Reality (VR) compared to Physical Reality (PR). Using eye- and head- tracking technology, and by conducting a study on two groups of users - participants in VR or PR - we identify how often these natural responses are observed in both environments. We find that users statistically move their heads more often when viewing stimuli in VR than in PR, and VR users also move their heads more in the presence of text. We open a discussion for identifying the HWD factors that cause this difference, as this may not only affect predictive models using eye movements as features, but also VR user experience overall.

We present a modeling approach to develop an agent that assists users discreetly in teleoperation when avateering a robot via an inexpensive motion sensor. Avateering is a powerful metaphor, and can be an effective teleoperating strategy. Avateering a Humanoid Robot (HR) with no wearable device encumberment, such as using the popular Kinect/NUI motion sensor, is also desirable and very promising. However, this control scheme makes it difficult for the slave robot to make contact and interact with objects with high accuracy due to factors such as viewpoint, individually-unique and unilateral human-side control imprecision, and lack of informative tactile feedback. Our research explores the addition of an assistive agent that arbitrates user input without disrupting the overall experience and expectation. Additionally, our agent assists with maintaining a higher level of accuracy for interaction tasks, in our case, a grasping and lifting scenario. Using theWebots robot simulator, we implemented 4 assistive agents to augment the user in avateering the Darwin-OP robot. The agent iterations are described, and results of a user study are presented. We discuss user perception towards the avateering metaphor when enhanced by the agent and also when unassisted, including perceived easiness of the task, responsiveness of the robot, and accuracy.

We present a study exploring upper body 3D spatial interaction metaphors for control and communication with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) such as the Parrot AR Drone. We discuss the design and implementation of five interaction techniques using the Microsoft Kinect, based on metaphors inspired by UAVs, to support a variety of flying operations a UAV can perform. Techniques include a first-person interaction metaphor where a user takes a pose like a winged aircraft, a game controller metaphor, where a user's hands mimic the control movements of console joysticks, "proxy" manipulation, where the user imagines manipulating the UAV as if it were in their grasp, and a pointing metaphor in which the user assumes the identity of a monarch and commands the UAV as such. We examine qualitative metrics such as perceived intuition, usability and satisfaction, among others. Our results indicate that novice users appreciate certain 3D spatial techniques over the smartphone application bundled with the AR Drone. We also discuss the trade-offs in the technique design metrics based on results from our study.