Maintaining social connections via informal gathering and communication in physical workspaces is challenging. To maintain connections without causing mental strain, we propose “Async Party,” an activity that reconfigures drinking rituals through asynchronicity by combining physical triggers with digital sharing. In this activity, participants record short videos of individual toasts, ask a nearby colleague to record their “cheers” moment, and upload the short video to the dedicated Slack channel. A three-month field deployment revealed that while the filming rule was designed to spark face-to-face interaction at the moment of recording, the encounters it produced were experienced not as procedural steps but as socially meaningful moments in their own right – a social quality that extended beyond our anticipation. Members derived a sense of community vitality not by watching every video, but by peripherally perceiving the accumulation of ritualistic content. Drawing on Research through Design, this study articulates a novel design space for "asynchronous rituals" – configurations in which synchrony and asynchrony are intentionally composed into a recurring temporal cycle – and derives three transferable design strategies for sustaining low-burden belonging in hybrid environments.

We characterize 16 challenges faced by those investigating and developing remote and synchronous collaborative experiences around visualization. Our work reflects the perspectives and prior research efforts of an international group of 29 experts from across human-computer interaction and visualization sub-communities. The challenges are anchored around five collaborative activities that exhibit a centrality of visualization and multimodal communication. These activities include exploratory data analysis, creative ideation, visualization-rich presentations, joint decision making grounded in data, and real-time data monitoring. The challenges also reflect the changing dynamics of these activities in the face of recent advances in extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI). As an organizing scheme for future research at the intersection of visualization and computer-supported cooperative work, we align the challenges with a sequence of four sets of research and development activities: technological choices, social factors, AI assistance, and evaluation.

Force feedback to the hand is essential for enhancing immersion in VR and facilitating skill transfer. However, no existing method allows unconstrained hand and arm positions while keeping the fingertips free. We present a novel fingertip-free technique that induces directional force illusions on the entire hand by applying asymmetric vibrations to antagonistic dorsal and palmar tendons. Through two user studies, we demonstrate that directional accuracy is significantly above chance level under dual-point asymmetric vibration, in contrast single-point or symmetric vibration. By integrating effective haptic feedback with unconstrained hand interaction, our approach offers a promising avenue toward richer VR experiences.

Cross-modal correspondence, exemplified by the Bouba/Kiki effect, which refers to the association between linguistic sounds and visual shape impressions, is known to influence taste perception. Previous studies have shown that taste perception varies with the visual features of foods, beverages, and tableware. However, it remains unclear how embodying a self-avatar in virtual reality (VR) whose visual features are associated with Bouba/Kiki influences taste perception. We conducted two studies to investigate the effects of cross-modal correspondence between VR self-avatar characteristics and taste perception using lemon-flavored carbonated beverages that elicit both sweetness and sourness. Study 1 directly compared Bouba avatars (round shapes, red colors, slow animations) and Kiki avatars (angular shapes, yellow colors, fast animations) in a within-participants design ($N = 36$N=36). Study 2 examined the effects of each avatar type separately by comparing them with neutral control conditions ($N = 72$N=72). In Study 1, the Bouba avatar led participants to perceive the beverage as mellower compared to the Kiki avatar. However, this effect was not significant when compared with a neutral control avatar in Study 2. In contrast, the Kiki avatar produced robust effects, increasing perceived sourness and sharpness in both studies. These findings suggest that the observed changes in taste are primarily driven by the congruence between avatar characteristics and the intrinsic sensory properties of the beverage. This study demonstrates the potential for avatar-mediated congruence effects to alter perceived taste in VR, highlighting the importance of the alignment between the user's virtual body and the consumed stimulus.

This study investigates how partner avatar design affects learning and memory when an avatar serves as a lecturer. Based on earlier research on the environmental context dependency of memory, we hypothesize that the use of diverse partner avatars results in a slower learning rate but better memory retention than that of a constant partner avatar. Accordingly, participants were tasked with memorizing Tagalog-Japanese word pairs. On the first day of the experiment, they repeatedly learned the pairs over six sessions from a partner avatar in an immersive virtual environment. One week later, on the second day of the experiment, they underwent a recall test in a real environment. We employed a between-participants design to compare the following conditions: the varied avatar condition, in which each repetition used a different avatar, and the constant avatar condition, in which the same avatar was used throughout the experiment. Results showed that participants in the varied avatar condition recalled significantly worse during the learning trials on the first day. However, we found no significant difference between conditions in the delayed recall test on the second day. We discuss these effects in relation to the social presence of the partner avatar. This study opens up a novel approach to optimizing the effectiveness of instructor avatars in immersive virtual environments.

The mirroring effect has been demonstrated to facilitate smooth social interactions. Digital technology can automatically implement mirroring to achieve more natural interactions in contexts where spontaneous mirroring is challenging, such as remote human communication or dialogue with non-human agents. However, many existing automatic mirroring systems replicate a user’s movements with a time delay, and when applied to full-body interactions between human users, such systems often result in excessive and unnatural mimicry. To address this issue, this study examines the effectiveness of Co-embodiment, a technique that blends the movements of a user and their partner in real-time, as a method for achieving both the benefits of mimicry and the naturalness of interaction. We examined how varying the blending ratios (0%, 25%, 50%) affects social impressions in a two-person interaction in the VE. Results showed that moderate blending (25%, 50%) enabled natural and comfortable interactions, comparable to no blending (0%). However, we did not observe significant improvements in perceived closeness or trustworthiness. Semi-structured interviews helped explain these results, revealing that participants differed in their interpretations of subtle synchronized movements. Some viewed them as signs of mutual understanding or cooperation, while others experienced discomfort. In some cases, this discomfort seemed specific to virtual contexts, as subtle similarities made participants doubt the presence of a real human behind the avatar. These findings highlight that impressions depend on whether blended movements feel socially responsive or merely imitative, stressing the need for interaction designs that enhance the sense of social presence.

Interpersonal communication often involves navigating social challenges like managing expectations and conveying intentions. In practical contexts like productivity and navigation of social boundaries, agent- and AI-mediated communication (AIMC) has served as an effective social intermediary. Communication within personal relationships, especially between intercultural friends from different backgrounds, can also face significant challenges, such as miscommunication and expressive suppression. However, AIMC remains underutilized in the context of established personal relationships due to ethical concerns about agency and authenticity. We propose designing openly-interpretable AIMC output as an augmented context cue to reduce its active social involvement, balancing AI support with preservation of relational agency. We developed and evaluated Poet-Weaver, a Discord text chat plugin that presents AI-generated insights on user conversations in a stylized, openly-interpretable way to encourage reflection on communication challenges. We conducted a mixed-methods study with 30 intercultural friend pairs to assess Poet-Weaver's impact. Findings showed Poet-Weaver effectively helped participants address communication failures, although AIMC still influenced users' behavior even with openly-interpretable output. We recommend future uses of AIMC that support transformative, positive relationship changes while preserving individual responsibility and identity within relationships.

Negative psychological effects from losing in online competitive games, such as frustration and reduced self-evaluation, can lead to player disengagement. Previous research using puzzle tasks has shown that providing losers with positive feedback on their performance after the task can enhance their intrinsic motivation. However, such findings were demonstrated in analog settings where feedback was delivered verbally by a human experimenter, and it remains unclear whether similar effects hold in digital environments such as online competitive games. This study investigates a feedback intervention using a virtual agent on a computer, aimed at mitigating such negative impacts and promoting sustained intrinsic motivation. In a controlled experiment with 45 participants, we compared three types of feedback: No Feedback (NF), Feedback for the Participant (FP), which included praise for the player’s good moves, and Feedback for Both (FB), which also praised the opponent and emphasized social connection. The results indicated that providing feedback, whether it was directed at the player alone or at both the player and the opponent, significantly increased perceived competence, autonomy, intrinsic motivation, and the intention to play again compared to not providing any feedback at all. We discuss the potential of personalized, praise-based feedback in sustaining healthy motivation during competitive gameplay.

Trust in agents within Virtual Reality is becoming increasingly important, as they provide advice and influence people's decision-making. However, previous studies show that encountering speech recognition errors can reduce users' trust in agents. Such errors lead users to ignore the agent's advice and make suboptimal decisions. While agents can offer an apology to repair trust, its effectiveness is often limited because it fails to fully repair the original level of trust. Therefore, we examined the use of social touch, a social interaction involving physical interaction between users and the virtual agent, to enhance the effect of an apology on trust repair and to increase the acceptability of its advice. In a controlled experiment (N=24), participants experienced a robotic arm touching the back of their hands while interacting with the agent before decision-making. The results showed that social touch did not repair participants' trust in agents. However, participants were more likely to accept the agent's advice when they experienced touch with physical feedback, regardless of the level of trust in the agent. We discuss the role of presenting physical haptic feedback and its influence on human-agent interactions in VR.

Recall impairment in a different environmental context from learning is called context-dependent forgetting. Two learning methods have been proposed to prevent context-dependent forgetting: reinstatement and decontextualization. Reinstatement matches the environmental context between learning and retrieval, whereas decontextualization involves repeated learning in various environmental contexts and eliminates the context dependency of memory. Conventionally, these methods have been validated by switching between physical rooms. However, in this study, we use immersive virtual environments (IVEs) as the environmental context assisted by virtual reality (VR), which is known for its low cost and high reproducibility compared to traditional manipulation. Whereas most existing studies using VR have failed to reveal the reinstatement effect, we test its occurrence using a 360-degree video-based IVE with improved familiarity and realism instead of a computer graphics-based IVE. Furthermore, we are the first to address decontextualization using VR. Our experiment showed that repeated learning in the same constant IVE as retrieval did not significantly reduce forgetting compared to repeated learning in different constant IVEs. Conversely, repeated learning in various IVEs significantly reduced forgetting than repeated learning in constant IVEs. These findings contribute to the design of IVEs for VR-based applications, particularly in educational settings.

This study proposes a new learning method that employs multiple embodied self-avatars during learning, to use the potential benefit of virtual reality (VR) for effective learning and training. In this study, by taking advantage of the benefit of virtual reality (VR), we propose a new learning method that employs multiple embodied self-avatars during learning. Based on the multiple-context effect, which posits that learning in diverse situations can prevent forgetting and enhance memory retention, we conducted a between-participants study under two conditions: the varied avatar condition, in which participants learned sign languages with different self-avatars in six iterations, and the constant avatar condition, in which the same self-avatar was used consistently. We employed sign language as a learning material that naturally draws attention to self-avatars and is suitable for investigating the effects of varying self-avatars. Initially, the varied avatar condition performed worse than the constant avatar condition. However, in a test conducted after one week in the real world, the varied avatar condition showed significantly less forgetting and better retention than the constant avatar condition. Furthermore, our results suggested a positive correlation between the degree of embodiment toward the avatars and the effectiveness of the proposed method. This study presents an innovative design approach for the use of self-avatars in VR-based education.

Redirected walking (RDW) is a method for exploring virtual spaces larger than physical spaces while preserving a natural walking sensation. Expanding the range of visual manipulation gains that can be applied without causing discomfort is necessary to apply RDW in practice. Ankle tendon electrical stimulation (TES) can expand the range by inducing body tilt sensation and sway. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a locomotion method that applies ankle TES to RDW. In Experiment 1, we evaluated the effect of TES on the detection threshold (DT), which is the maximal gain at which visual manipulation remains unnoticed. The results indicated that the DT was expanded when TES was applied to induce the body tilt sensation in the same direction as the RDW's visual manipulation. Specifically, the pooled mean of the DT was expanded by more than 18%. In Experiment 2, we evaluated the applicability, a supplementary index for assessing locomotion techniques. The results demonstrated that ankle TES mitigates the reduction of the applicability, especially under a curvature gain of $\pm 0.3 [m^{-1}]$±0.3[m-1].

Hand redirection, which subtly adjusts a user's hand movements in a virtual environment, can modify perception and movement by providing real-time corrections to motor feedback. In the context of motor learning and rehabilitation, observing replays of movements has been shown to enhance motor function. The application of hand redirection to these replays by making movements appear larger or smaller than they actually are has the potential to improve motor function. However, the detection threshold for hand redirection, specifically in the context of motion replays, remains unclear, as it has primarily been studied in real-time feedback settings. This study aims to determine the threshold at which hand redirection during post-exercise replay sessions becomes detectable. We conducted two psychophysical experiments to evaluate how much discrepancy between replayed and actual movements can go unnoticed by users, both with hand redirection (N=20) and without (N=18). Our findings reveal a tendency for the amount of movement during replay to be underestimated. Furthermore, compared to conventional real-time hand redirection without replay, replay manipulations involving redirection applied during the preceding reaching task resulted in a significantly larger JND. These insights are crucial for leveraging hand redirection techniques in replay-based motor learning applications.

The methods of displaying virtual agents and avatars as lecturers have been studied in remote lectures and asynchronous education. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that presenting information using multiple virtual avatars facilitates users’ memory performance. In a memory task involving remembering 100 words, we compared a condition where the same avatar narrated all the words to a condition where different avatars each presented 25 words. The results of the online experiment showed no significant differences in the number of words recalled between both conditions. However, we found that switching between avatars significantly aided in recalling the source of information, namely, discerning which avatars read specific words. Furthermore, through an exploratory analysis, we found that using a human avatar resulted in better memory retention than using other avatars (red panda, extraterrestrial being, robot). The participants’ feedback also indicated that the red panda avatar may be perceived favorably and that the quality of lip-syncing was associated with discomfort. These findings are expected to enrich future research on agents and avatars in educational settings.

Advancements in virtual reality technology have facilitated users in freely changing their appearance during communication. Notably, it has become evident that the perceptual and cognitive responses of users vary when their partner uses an animal avatar compared to those when using a human avatar. This study aimed to clarify the effects of partner-avatars on memory through experiments wherein participants were tasked with memorizing the profiles spoken by the partner-avatars. A preliminary experiment validated the assumption that both the animal avatars and the virtual environments could be integrated into processes of profile memory. Subsequently, the primary experiment examined differences in performance in remembering partners’ profiles when the partners were animal avatars versus human avatars. The results showed that the animal avatar condition was marginally inferior to the human avatar condition. Moreover, the perceived intimacy and the presence of others were significantly lower in the animal avatar condition. These findings suggested that interacting with animal avatars may have specific drawbacks in terms of profile memory and engagement in social interactions within virtual environments.

Episodic memory is influenced by environmental contexts, such as location and auditory stimuli. The most well-known effect is the reinstatement effect, which refers to the phenomenon where contextual matching between learning and testing enhances memory retrieval. Previous studies have investigated whether the reinstatement effect can be observed within immersive virtual environments. However, only a limited number of studies have reported a significant reinstatement effect using virtual reality, while most have failed to detect it. In this study, we re-examined the reinstatement effect using 360-degree video-based virtual environments. Specifically, we carefully selected virtual environments to elicit different emotional responses, which has been suggested as a key factor in inducing a robust reinstatement effect in the physical world. Surprisingly, we found a significant reversed reinstatement effect with a large effect size. This counter-intuitive result suggests that contextual congruence does not necessarily enhance memory and may even interfere with it. This outcome may be explained by the retrieval-induced forgetting phenomenon, but further exploration is needed. This finding is particularly important for virtual reality-based, educational applications and highlights the need for a deeper understanding of the complex interactions between memory and contextual cues within virtual environments.

As a redirected walking technique, a method has been proposed to enable users to walk in an undulating virtual space even in a flat physical environment by setting the slope of the floor in the virtual environment to be different from that in the physical environment without causing discomfort. However, the slope range in which discrepancies between visual and proprioceptive sensations are not perceived is limited, restricting the slopes that can be presented. In this study, we proposed redirected walking using electrical stimulation of the Achilles and tibialis anterior muscle tendons, extending the applicable slope range of redirected walking without compromising the natural gait sensation. Electrical stimulation of the ankle tendons affects the proprioceptive sensation and gives the illusion of tilting in the standing posture, expanding the applicable slope range. Two experiments showed that the proposed method improved the experience of uphill and downhill walking in terms of the range of the virtual slope where a high naturalness of gait and a high congruency of visual and proprioceptive sensations are maintained. Notably, electrical stimulation of the Achilles tendons significantly improved the naturalness of the walking experience during virtual downhill walking, which has been considered more challenging in previous studies.

During video conferencing, technical issues such as network impairments can unexpectedly hinder remote collaboration for distributed teams. However, it remains unclear how such issues affect the impression formation process between unacquainted interlocutors in situations like job interviews or kick-off meetings. Having first encounters online without prior in-person interaction has become prevalent nowadays. Therefore, examining the impact of technical issues on remote unacquainted interlocutors and exploring design solutions to reduce the negative impact of technical issues on the impression is essential in informing the design of future communication systems. With three controlled experiments simulating an online job interview, we discovered that technical issues made people give low credibility ratings to remote job applicants (Study 1). We further examined two intervention approaches to reduce the negative impact of technical issues in video conferencing, including a virtual agent represented in a human-like avatar to actively take responsibility for the technical issues (Study 2), and forewarning messages to inform people about the technical issues in video conferencing (Study 3). Results demonstrated that introducing an agent that represents a communication system to take responsibility for technical issues actively could reduce the responsibility people assign to remote job applicants, but without increasing their positive credibility rating for remote job applicants. Furthermore, showing forewarning messages, which explicitly made people aware the cause of technical issues was unidentifiable and its potential negative impacts on impression formation, enabled people to rate the credibility of the remote counterpart without being influenced by technical issues. We discussed how interventions can be designed to mitigate negative attribution outcomes when encountering uncontrollable technical issues in computer-mediated communication.

We present Virtual Reality Self Co-embodiment, a new method for post-stroke upper limb rehabilitation. It is inspired by mirror therapy, where the patient's healthy arm is involved in recovering the affected arm's motion. By tracking the user's head, wrists, and fingers' positions, our new approach allows the handicapped arm to control a digital avatar in order to pursue a reaching task. We apply the concept of virtual co-embodiment to use the information from the unaffected arm and complete the affected limb's impaired motion, which is our added unique feature. This requires users to mechanically involve the incapacitated area as much as possible, prioritizing actual movement rather than the sole imagination of it. As a result, subjects will see a seemingly normally functional virtual arm primarily controlled by their handicapped extremity, but with the constant support of their healthy limb's motion. Our experiment compares the task execution performance and embodiment perceived when interacting with both mirror therapy and our proposed technique. We found that our approach's provided sense of ownership is mildly impacted by users' motion planning response times, which mirror therapy does not exhibit. We also observed that mirror therapy's sense of ownership is moderately affected by the subject's proficiency while executing the assigned task, which our new method did not display. The results indicate that our proposed method provides similar embodiment and rehabilitation capabilities to those perceived from existing mirror therapy. This experiment was performed in healthy individuals to have an unbiased comparison of how mirror therapy's and VRSelfCo's task performance and degree of virtual embodiment compare, but future work explores the possibility of applying this new approach to actual post-stroke patients.

Hand redirection is a technique used in virtual reality (VR) to alter the virtual hand position from the real hand position, enabling extended interaction in VR. This technique capitalizes on the visual system’s dominance over proprioception, whereby discrepancies between the virtual hand mapping and the reality below a specific threshold are indiscernible to users. However, these detection thresholds are often minute. In this study, we explore the impact of haptic stimuli known as the ‘hanger reflex’ on the detection threshold of hand redirection, specifically concerning forearm pronation, which involves rotating the user’s palm downward. To achieve this, we conducted a user study that involved manipulating the degree of forearm rotation and measuring detection thresholds in three conditions: Neutral, where no force was applied; Inward, where haptic feedback was provided to match the direction of hand rotation through the hanger reflex; and Outward, where haptic feedback was provided in the opposite direction of hand rotation. The results demonstrate that, in the Neutral condition, the virtual degree of rotation can vary between 0.896 and 1.136 times the actual amount without being perceptible to users. However, under the Inward condition, this range increases to between 0.888 and 1.204 times the actual amount, representing a significant expansion of the detection threshold range. Consequently, our findings contribute to the field of upper limb rehabilitation.

When receiving text messages from unacquainted colleagues in fully remote workplaces, insufficient mutual understanding and limited social cues can lead people to misinterpret the tone of the message and further influence their impression of remote colleagues. Emojis have been commonly used for supporting expressive communication; however, people seldom use emojis before they become acquainted with each other. Hence, we explored how changing facial expressions in profile pictures could be an alternative channel to communicate socio-emotional cues. By conducting an online controlled experiment with 186 participants, we established that changing facial expressions of profile pictures can influence the impression of the message receivers toward the sender and the message valence when receiving neutral messages. Furthermore, presenting incongruent profile pictures to positive messages negatively affected the interpretation of the message valence, but did not have much effect on negative messages. We discuss the implications of affective profile pictures in supporting text-based communication.

Episodic memory incorporates environmental contexts, and memory retrieval is aided by matching the retrieval context to the encoding context. This study tested whether similar context-dependency of memory could be confirmed in virtual environments. Participants learned words in a 360-degree video-based virtual environment depicting either natural or urban landscapes. Immediately, they completed a test in the same virtual environment. After two days, half of the participants underwent a final test with the same context as that on the initial day, whereas the other half underwent it with a different context. Surprisingly, participants tested in a different context exhibited significantly lower forgetting than those tested in the same context, which contradicted our hypothesis.

Advances in virtual reality technology have enabled the creation of virtual environments (VEs) with significantly high visual fidelity when compared to real environments (REs). In this study, we use a high-fidelity VE to examine two effects caused by alternating VE and RE experiences: "context-dependent forgetting" and "source-monitoring errors." The former effect is that memories learned in VEs are more easily recalled in VEs than in REs, whereas memories learned in REs are more easily recalled in REs than in VEs. The source-monitoring error is that memories learned in VEs are easily confused with those learned in REs, making discriminating the source of the memory difficult. We hypothesized that the visual fidelity of VEs is responsible for these effects and conducted an experiment using two types of VEs: a high-fidelity VE created using photogrammetry techniques and low-fidelity VE created with primitive shapes and materials. The results show that the high-fidelity VE significantly improved the sense of presence. However, the level of the visual fidelity of the VEs did not show any effect on context-dependent forgetting and source-monitoring errors. Notably, the null results of the context-dependent forgetting between the VE and RE were strongly supported by Bayesian analysis. Thus, we indicate that context-dependent forgetting does not necessarily occur, which will be helpful for VR-based education and training.

Presenting haptic feedback in virtual reality (VR) is a long-standing challenge, with passive haptics being one way of presenting haptic feedback inexpensively. However, passive haptics requires props in physical environments that are co-located with their virtual counterparts, which is often not the case in the real world. Although redirected hands and other methods have previously been proposed to solve this problem, significant differences between the displayed and actual hand positions can cause the degradation of presence and sense of embodiment, limiting the range of presentable environments. In this study, we present a new hand displacement method called wormholes, in which the virtual hand is teleported discontinuously as the user inserts their hand into the hole. The experiment showed that the wormhole could maintain the sense of embodiment, presence, and task performance even with large hand displacements. Our method enables to apply passive haptics even when the actual and virtual environments are quite different, contributing to the realization of inexpensive and flexible haptic presentation in VR applications.

In this study, we focused on one-to-many remote collaboration which requires more mental resources from the remote instructor than the case of one-to-one since it is "multitasking". The main contribution of our study is that we assessed instructor’s capacity in one-to-many AR remote instruction giving both subjectively and objectively. We compared the remote instructor’s workload while interacting with a different number of local workers, assuming tasks at an industrial site. The results showed that the instructors perceived stronger workload and the communication quality became lower when interacting with multiple local workers. Based on the results, we discussed how to support the remote instructor in a one-to-many AR remote collaboration.

No abstract available.

We are delighted to present this issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, which contains scholarship from the Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) community. This issue has 293 papers, 94 that were accepted from the April 2021 cycle, 61 that were accepted from the July 2021 cycle, and 138 that were accepted from the January 2022 cycle. It reflects great efforts and contributions from external reviewers, Associate Chairs and Editors, who together have conducted a rigorous review process. As Papers Chairs, we are grateful for the community's collective efforts to continue shaping and sharing CSCW's tradition of high-quality scholarship during an ongoing global pandemic.

Workers tend to make inferences about one another's commitment and dedication to work depending on what cues are available to them, affecting worker relationships and collaboration outcomes. In this work, we investigate how remote work affects workers' perceptions of their colleagues with different levels of social connectivity, commonly referred to as strong ties and weak ties. When working remotely, workers' perceptions of weak ties may suffer due to the lack of in-person interaction. On the other hand, workers' inferences about their strong ties may also be impacted by losing richer communication cues, even though they had more connections with their strong ties than weak ties. This study explores how remote workers make inferences about engagement levels of and willingness to collaborate with weak ties compared to strong ties. We used a mixed-methods approach involving survey data, experience sampling, and in-depth interviews with 20 workers from different companies in Taiwan. Results showed that workers depended on one-on-one synchronous tools to infer the engagement level of strong ties but used group-based communication tools to infer the engagement level of weak ties. Interestingly, the absence of cues in remote workplaces exacerbated prior impressions formed in the physical office. Furthermore, remote work led workers to develop polarized perceptions of their respective ties. We discuss how characteristics of computer-mediated communication tools and interaction types interplay to affect workers' perceptions of remote colleagues and identify design opportunities for helping remote workers maintain awareness of weak ties.

Emotional contagion is a phenomenon in which one’s emotions are transmitted among individuals unconsciously by observing others’ emotional expressions. In this paper, we propose a method for mediating people’s emotions by triggering emotional contagion through artificial bodily changes such as pseudo tears. We focused on shedding tears because of the link to several emotions besides sadness. In addition, it is expected that shedding tears would induce emotional contagion because it is observable by others. We designed an eyeglasses-style wearable device, Teardrop glasses, that release water drops near the wearer’s eyes. The drops flow down the cheeks and emulate real tears. The study revealed that artificial crying with pseudo tears increased sadness among both wearers and those observing them. Moreover, artificial crying attenuated happiness and positive feelings in observers. Our findings show that actual bodily changes are not necessary for inducing emotional contagion as artificial bodily changes are also sufficient.

This research aims to build a system that estimates assessment expressions to others by machine learning, collects them in real time, and feeds them back to the participants, and this study proposes two techniques that are necessary for this purpose. First, we propose a method to estimate the evaluative behavior to others, which is simplified to positive, negative, and neutral, from the facial images and head acceleration of participants in the conversation. The supervised machine learning algorithm requires ground-truth labeling. To analyze the expression of a large number of people, such as in a classroom, ground-truth labeling becomes a challenge in analysis and system construction. Second, to ease the labeling process we propose and implement a method to recommend the estimated labels on the labeling software. The accuracy of the proposed method is approximately 0.45 in F-value. Considering the time-series information, the proposed method recognizes major changes in positive evaluation behaviors. Presenting recommended labels on our labeling support system increase with time for the ground-truth labeling. However, the accuracy of labeling positive assessments improve in five out of six subjects.

In this study, considering the characteristics of multisensory integration, we examined a method for improving redirected walking (RDW) by adding noise to the vestibular system to reduce the effects of vestibular inputs on self-motion perception. In RDW, the contradiction between vestibular inputs and visual sensations may make users notice the RDW manipulation, resulting in discomfort throughout the experience. Because humans integrate multisensory information by considering the reliability of each modality, by reducing the effects of vestibular inputs on self-motion perception, it is possible to suppress awareness of and discomfort during RDW manipulation and improve the effectiveness of the manipulation. Therefore, we hypothesized that adding noise to the vestibular inputs would reduce the reliability of the vestibular sensations and enhances the effectiveness of RDW by improving the relative reliability of vision. In this study, we used noisy galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) to reduce the reliability of vestibular inputs. GVS is a method of stimulating vestibular organs and nerves by applying small electrical currents to the bilateral mastoid. To reduce the reliability of vestibular inputs, we employed noisy GVS whose current pattern is white noise. We experimented with comparing the threshold of curvature gains between noisy GVS conditions and a control condition.

Several virtual reality (VR) proxies have been developed that can emulate impact sensations by generating actual forces on the hand. Although these proxies contribute to increasing the reality of VR, they still have some limitations, such as high latency, high power consumption, and low frequency to provide impact sensations. To overcome these limitations, we first propose a method to provide an impact sensation without actual force generation by quickly changing the rotational inertia of a handheld proxy while users are swinging it. Then, we developed Unident, a handheld proxy capable of changing its rotational inertia by moving a weight along one axis at a high speed. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the ability of Unident to provide users with impact sensations. In the first experiment, we demonstrate that Unident can physically provide an impact sensation applied to a handheld object by analyzing the pressure on the user's palm. The second experiment shows that Unident can provide an impact sensation with various magnitudes depending on the amount of rotational inertia to be changed. Finally, we present an application that can be enabled by Unident.

Gastroenterological endoscopic surgery needs complex surgical skills such as a sensation of body movement and manipulation of the endoscope that is hard to be explained verbally. Prior research reported that endoscopic surgery is one of the most challenging surgery to teach. Thus, surgeons need long-term practice to master the skills. To support learning such skills, we developed a surgical scene replay system. First, we surveyed 12 surgeons to reveal the reason for the difficulty and elicited three requirements for our system: (1) provide multiple videos that include an endoscope, a fluoroscopy, and hand manipulation for the endoscope to observe the surgery from multiple aspects; (2) visualize an experts' gaze position to understand experts' intention of hand manipulation, and (3) enlarge the size of the gazed video to inform learners where they should pay attention to. Our user study with the system indicates that participants could understand the experts' intentions and tacit knowledge easier than the existing video materials.

In this paper, we propose a novel redirected walking (RDW) technique that applies dynamic bending and curvature gains so that users perceive less discomfort than existing techniques that apply constant gains. Humans are less likely to notice continuous changes than those that are sudden. Therefore, instead of applying constant bending or curvature gains to users, we propose a dynamic method that continuously changes the gains. We conduct experiments to investigate the effect of dynamic gains in bending and curvature manipulation with regards to discomfort. The experimental results show that the proposed method significantly suppresses discomfort by up to 16 and 9% for bending and curvature manipulations, respectively.

Preventing users from walking through virtual boundaries (e.g., walls) is an important issue to be addressed in room-scale virtual environments (VEs), considering the safety and design limitations. Sensory feedback from wall collisions has been shown to be effective; however, it can disrupt the immersion. We assumed that a greater sense of presence would discourage users from walking through walls and conducted a two-factor between-subjects experiment (N = 92) that controls the anthropomorphism (realistic or abstract) and visibility (full-body or hand-only) of self-avatars. We analyzed the participants' behaviors and the moment they first penetrated the wall in game-like VEs that gradually instigated participants to penetrate the walls. The results showed that the realistic full-body self-avatar was the most effective for discouraging the participants from penetrating the walls. Furthermore, the participants with lower presence tended to walk through the walls sooner. This study can contribute to applications that require realistic user responses in VEs.

We introduce PoCoPo, the first handheld pin-based shape display that can render various 2.5D shapes in hand in realtime. We designed the display small enough for a user to hold it in hand and carry it around, thereby enhancing the haptic experiences in a virtual environment. PoCoPo has 18 motor-driven pins on both sides of a cuboid, providing the sensation of skin contact on the user's palm and fingers. We conducted two user studies to understand the capability of PoCoPo. The first study showed that the participants were generally successful in distinguishing the shapes rendered by PoCoPo with an average success rate of 88.5%. In the second study, we investigated the acceptable visual size of a virtual object when PoCoPo rendered a physical object of a certain size. The result led to a better understanding of the acceptable differences between the perceptions of visual size and haptic size.

Video communication systems have been suffered from the narrow field of view. To solve this limitation, one study proposed symmetric 360° video communication system by combining an omnidirectional camera and a hemispherical display. However, the system still had several issues, e.g., the invisibility of hemisphere which was at the opposite side from a user caused the inconvenience of observing the remote environment. To solve these issues, we introduce OmniGlobe, a novel symmetric full 360° video communication system which incorporates an omnidirectional camera, a full spherical display, and several visual or interactive techniques. Based on an experiment, we could indicate that our system is effective in reducing the inconvenience of observing the remote environment and increased the remote space awareness and user's gaze awareness to support remote collaboration. We also discuss the takeaways, limitations and application areas in our system which help improve the system.

In this paper, we compared three different types of avatar design (“Body”, “Hand + Arm”, and “Hand only”) for the augmented reality remote instruction system in terms of usability. The result showed that the usability of the remote instruction system with full body avatar has a higher usability. In addition, participants felt more easily to track the full body avatar than the avatar with hand only. However, concerning the understandability of the instruction, there was no difference between three designs.

Recent developments in gaze tracking present new opportunities for social computing. This paper presents a study of Tama, a gaze actuated smart speaker. Tama was designed taking advantage of research on gaze in conversation. Rather than being activated with a wake word (such as "Ok Google") Tama detects the gaze of a user, moving an articulated 'head' to achieve mutual gaze. We tested Tama's use in a multi-party conversation task, with users successfully activating and receiving a response to over 371 queries (over 10 trials). When Tama worked well, there was no significant difference in length of interaction. However, interactions with Tama had a higher rate of repeated queries, causing longer interactions overall. Video analysis lets us explain the problems users had interacting with gaze. In the discussion, we describe implications for designing new gaze systems, using gaze both as input and output. We also discuss how the relationship to anthropomorphic design and taking advantage of learned skills of interaction. Finally, two paths for future work are proposed, one in the field of speech agents, and the second in using human gaze as an interaction modality more widely.

Field-of-view limitation has been a long-standing issue in video communication systems. With the advancement of omnidirectional panoramic technology, the omnidirectional camera, which can provide a 360° field of view, has become increasingly popular in the last few years. Previous research indicated that one-way video communication systems with a wider field of view improve task efficiency. Therefore, we propose to utilize omnidirectional cameras in a symmetrical video communication system and study how this configuration affects remote collaboration. In this study, we conducted experiments based on two conditions, which are an omnidirectional camera with a spherical display and an omnidirectional camera with a horizontally placed 2D flat display. Under these conditions, we analyzed how the display types affected remote collaboration. Our results show that participants marginally preferred the spherical display to the 2D flat display. We also show the advantages and disadvantages of each display. The findings contribute to our understanding of how to design an environment for remote collaboration that captures and shows a 360° panoramic view of a remote site.

With respect to collaborative physical tasks, gaze and gestures play significant roles when referring to physical objects. In video-mediated communication, however, such nonverbal cues become "ineffectual" when they are presented via a 2D monitor, making video-mediated collaborative physical tasks inefficient. This study focuses on gaze cues to support remote collaborative physical tasks and uses an eye-shaped display, "ThirdEye," a simple add-on display that represents a remote participant's gaze direction. ThirdEye is expected to be especially effective when used with mobile terminals. We investigated whether the ThirdEye's gaze shift is effective in leading a local observer's attention toward objects in the local environment, even when ThirdEye is presented with the actual face image of a remote person. Experimental results show that ThirdEye can lead the local participant's attention to intended objects faster than without ThirdEye.

Previous research has shown that tracking technologies have the potential to help family caregivers optimize their coping strategies and improve their relationships with care recipients. In this paper, we explore how sharing the tracked data (i.e., caregiving journals and patient's conditions) with other family caregivers affects home care and family communication. Although previous works suggested that family caregivers may benefit from reading the records of others, sharing patients' private information might fuel negative feelings of surveillance and violation of trust for care recipients. To address this research question, we added a sharing feature to the previously developed tracking tool and deployed it for six weeks in the homes of 15 family caregivers who were caring for a depressed family member. Our findings show how the sharing feature attracted the attention of care recipients and helped the family caregivers discuss sensitive issues with care recipients.

In this study, we investigate whether a telepresence robot enhances the persuasiveness of a remote boss, which is measured by the behavior changes or opinion changes of the communication partner. In our study, we used the telepresence robot as a proxy of the teleworking boss. We designed a simplified in-basket test to enable quantitative measurement of the task outcome. We also included a questionnaire as a subjective measure. In our experiment, we tested whether the movements of the robot affect the persuasiveness of the remote boss. The task outcome showed that the robot's movements had no effect in terms of persuasiveness. Interestingly, however, the questionnaire results suggest that the movements of the robot, especially its orientation toward individual subordinates when giving comments, seemed to strengthen the sense of pressure subordinates experienced when performing a task.

We propose OmniEyeball (OEB), which is a novel interactive 360° image I/O system combining a spherical display system with an omnidirectional camera. We also present our experimental design of a user interface on the OEB, including a vision-based touch detection technique as well as several visual and interactive features. Our proposed techniques may contribute to solving the weak awareness of the opposite side of the spherical display as well as the workload caused by walking around in the 360° symmetric video communication.

We propose to artificially manipulate participants' vocal cues, amplitude and frequency, in real time to adjust their dominance and persuasiveness during audio conferences. We implemented a prototype system and conducted two experiments. The first experiment investigated the effect of vocal cue manipulation on the perception of dominance. The results showed that participants perceived higher dominance while listening to a voice with a high amplitude and low frequency. The second experiment investigated the effect of vocal cue manipulation on persuasiveness. The results indicated that a person with a low amplitude and low frequency voice had greater persuasiveness in conversations with biased dominance, while there was no statistically significant difference in persuasiveness in conversations with unbiased dominance.

In this paper we report on a pervasive practice in video-mediated communication: where participants show one another one or more objects. This is a distinct activity from others considered by researchers of video-mediated technologies that focus on a face-to-face orientation, or just on the support necessary to help people to refer to objects. We first present examples of this pervasive phenomenon in naturally occurring Skype conversations, revealing how this conduct is configured and organized within the interaction between participants. We reveal how the subtle adjustment of the position of the body, the head and gaze with respect to the handheld objects offers crucial resources for participants to achieve joint seeing. Then we report on a quite different setting, a naturalistic experiment where participants collaborate on a collective task with remote colleagues through maneuverable, orientable devices (Kubis). Again, in these experiments participants frequently show objects, and at times the devices provide additional resources to support these activities. But at other times they also involve some difficulties. We conclude by suggesting possible technological developments, some quite simple, others more radical, that might support participants to show objects, whether they are in domestic settings or undertaking work activities.

A long-standing challenge in video-mediated communication systems is to represent a remote participant's gaze direction in local environments correctly. To address this issue, we developed ThirdEye, an add-on eye-display for a video communication system. This display is made from an artificial ulexite (TV rock) that is cut into a hemispherical shape, enabling light from the bottom surface to be projected onto the hemisphere surface. By drawing an appropriate ellipse on an LCD and placing ThirdEye over it, this system simulates an eyeball. Our experiment proved that an observer could perceive a remote Looker's gaze direction more precisely when the gaze was presented using ThirdEye compared to the case in which the gaze was presented using the Looker's face on a flat display.

Previous research on healthcare technologies has shown how health tracking promotes desired behavior changes and effective health management. However, little is known about how the family caregivers' use of tracking technologies impacts the patient-caregiver relationship in the home. In this paper, we explore how health-tracking technologies could be designed to support family caregivers cope better with a depressed family member. Based on an interview study, we designed a simple tracking tool called Family Mood and Care Tracker (FMCT) and deployed it for six weeks in the homes of 14 family caregivers who were caring for a depressed family member. FMCT is a tracking tool designed specifically for family caregivers to record their caregiving activities and patient's conditions. Our findings demonstrate how caregivers used it to better understand the illness and cope with depressed family members. We also show how our tool improves family communication, despite the initial concerns about patient-caregiver conflicts.

This study extends existing Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) experiments to employ life-size full-body humanlike android robot to investigate body ownership illusion and the sense of agency. For this study, we designed a novel experimental setting. The android robot moved synchronously with a participant's head and arm motion. Furthermore, a stereoscopic camera was mounted on the android's head and the video stream from the camera was provided to a head mounted display (HMD) that the participant wore. Then, the participant and the robot were facing each other, so that the participant could see his/her own body in the HMD like a reflection in a mirror. During the experiment, the participant was asked to touch his/her own body by the hands of an android robot. The results of our study confirmed that the body ownership process worked with the full body android robot. The results also showed that our system enabled the participants to feel the sense of agency to some extent.

In this study, we used a humanoid robot as a telepresence robot and compared with the basic telepresence robot which can only rotate the display in order to reveal the effect of embodiment. We also investigated the effect caused by changing the body size of the humanoid robot by using two different size of robots. Our experimental results revealed that the embodiment increases the remote person's social telepresence, familiarity, and directivity. The comparison between small and big humanoid robots showed no difference and both of them were effective.

A long-standing challenge of video-mediated communication systems is to correctly represent remote participant gaze direction in local environments. A telepresence robot with a movable display that shows the face of a remote participant is a promising approach for solving this issue. Researchers generally consider that display orientation is effective for local participants to properly estimate the gaze direction of remote participants. We investigate how subjects estimate gaze direction of a remote participant ("Looker") when his/her face is displayed on a rotatable flat display. Our experiment reveals that both the Looker's head-eye rotation in the display and display rotation affect subject estimation, but the effect of the display rotation is relatively small. Furthermore, we reveal that subjects tend to overestimate Looker gaze direction. Based on our results, we propose a design implication for a telepresence robot to reduce overestimation and properly represent the remote participant gaze direction.

In this paper we report on some experiments with a high fidelity media space, t-Room, an immersive system that presents full scale, real-time images of co-participants. The system has been enhanced to provide more flexibility in the ways participants could organise themselves and the materials they are working on. Drawing on some quasi-naturalistic experiments, where the participants were required to undertake a range of complex tasks, we consider the formations they adopt and the issues and problems that arise when they attempt to establish and preserve a common focus and alignment. We conclude by briefly discussing the consequences for developing advanced spaces to support collaborative work and understanding complex video-mediated interaction.

To support astronomy education, we developed a tangible learning environment called the tangible earth system. To clarify its problems, we defined an assessment framework from the aspects of curriculum guidelines, design guidelines of tangible learning environments, and epistemology of agency. Based on the analysis of our small-scale user study, we identified problems of the system in terms of location, dynamics, and correspondence parameters.

This study proposes and demonstrates a progressive development method for an autonomous robot that is used for childhood education. The main concept in this method is to iteratively explore new behavioral factors and use them to progressively develop the robot by concurrently using and comparing two robots in a classroom. Usually, in classrooms for young children, it is practically difficult to recruit a sufficient number of participants and conduct many experiments. The parallel comparison employed in the proposed method enables rapid development to deal with these difficulties.

We studied educational support delivered through a care-receiving robot (CRR) in a children's group activity intended to promote the learning of English words by teaching the robot. Our prior study investigated the feasibility of the CRR for providing educational support in a situation where a child played with the robot by him/herself. Our research uncovered several impactful effects of the CRR for enhancing childhood education. However, the results were not sufficient to confirm more practical contributions of the CRR toward learning. In this paper, we report on a field experiment we conducted with a group of children at a Japanese kindergarten aged 5-6 years. Our goal was to verify the feasibility of an autonomous CRR for facilitating the learning of English words in an educational setting that closely resembled reality. The experiment was conducted on a group of roughly seven children who participated in an animal gesture game with the robot for four days to learn six English words/names for animals. There were a total of 15 participants, and we held two experimental sessions. In order to compare the educational effects between learning with the aid of the CRR and with an expert robot, both robots were introduced concurrently into classrooms. The experimental results showed that the autonomous CRR was more effective in promoting English vocabulary acquisition among preschoolers compared to the expert robot.

Depression is one of the most common disabilities in developed countries. Despite its often devastating impact on families, scant research has focused on how to facilitate the well-being of family caregivers. The aim of this paper is to uncover the challenges faced by family caregivers and support their well-being with the use of technologies. To understand the emotional and social burden of caregivers and how they handle their stress, we conducted in-depth interviews with 15 individuals who have cared for a depressed family member. Our findings reveal the multifaceted dilemma of caring for a depressed family member as well as the various strategies engaged in by caregivers to improve their own situations. Based on our findings, we suggest design implications for healthcare technologies to improve the wellness of caregivers who are looking after depressed family members.

This paper presents a study of a method for estimating the position and orientation of a photo-shoot in indoor environments for augmented reality applications. Our proposed localization method is based on registered frame data of virtualized reality models, which are photos with known photo-shoot positions and orientations, and depth data. Because registered frame data are secondary product of modeling process, additional works are not necessary to create registered frame data especially for the localization. In the method, a photo taken by a mobile camera is compared to registered frame data for the localization. Since registered frame data are linked with photo-shoot position, orientation, and depth data, 3D coordinates of each pixel on the photo of registered frame data is available. We conducted experiments with employing five techniques of the estimation for comparative evaluations.

A concern with “embodied action” has informed both the analysis of everyday action through technologies and also suggested ways of designing innovative systems. In this article, we consider how these two programs, the analysis of everyday embodied interaction on the one hand, and the analysis of technically-mediated embodied interaction on the other, are interlinked. We draw on studies of everyday interaction to reveal how embodied conduct is embedded in the environment. We then consider a collaborative technology that attempts to provide a coherent way of presenting life-sized embodiments of participants alongside particular features of the environment. These analyses suggest that conceptions of embodied action should take account of the interactional accomplishment of activities and how these are embedded in the material environment.

Various systems for hand tool skill training have been developed in the domain of haptic displays. These systems typically present force to a learner's palm by directly actuating the tool. However, this approach is sometimes ineffective because learners have difficulty sensing the haptic feedback from the tool when they are holding it tightly. Thus, we propose a different approach (OCHD) that effectively guides the learner's hand by presenting force to the back of his/her hand as if an instructor is holding it. A preliminary experiment showed that OCHD effectively guides users with less actuator drive force than cases where the tool is directly actuated.

In this paper we report on some experiments with a high fidelity media space, t-Room, an immersive system that presents full scale, real-time images of co-participants who are in similar spaces many miles apart. Although being designed to provide a coherent environment for interaction the system introduces a number of incongruities, both in time and space. Drawing on some quasi-naturalistic experiments, where the participants were required to analyse complex data, we consider how the participants manage these incongruities. We conclude by briefly discussing the resources people utilize to produce and recognize conduct in embodied spaces.

In this study, we examine how remote collaborators' upper body view affects collaboration when people engage in multiparty fluid tabletop activities across distances. We experimentally investigated the effects of upper body view on four-person group tabletop collaboration, two-by-two at identical locations: shared tabletop vs. shared tabletop plus upper body view. Although previous research has often failed to illustrate the advantages of showing remote participants' upper body view, our study showed that task performance was significantly higher in conditions with upper body view. Furthermore, participants with upper body view tended to take a step away from their remote partners to effectively glance at them while taking a comparable perspective of the tabletop objects. Detailed analysis of the video recordings revealed that upper body view was effective for fluid tabletop collaboration because it helped achieve joint perspective and helped estimate the timing and rough location of subsequent tabletop activity.

Collaborative distributed tabletop activities involving real objects are complicated by invisibility factors introduced into the workspace. In this paper, we propose a technique called "remote lag" to alleviate the problems caused by the invisibility of remote gestures. The technique provides people with instant playback of remote gestures to recover from the missed context of coordination. To examine the effects of the proposed technique, we studied four-person groups who engaged in two mentoring tasks using physical objects with and without remote lags. Our results show that remote lags effectively alleviated the invisibility problems, resulting in fewer questions/confirmations and redundant instructions during collaboration. The technique also decreased the overall workload of workers as well as the temporal demands for both helpers and workers.

An information-presenting robot is expected to establish an appropriate spatial relationship with people. Drawing upon sociological studies of spatial relationships involving "F-formation" and "body torque," we examined the effect of a robot rotating its body on the reconfiguration of the F-formation arrangement. The results showed that a robot can change the position of a visitor by rotating its body. We also confirmed that to reconfigure the F-formation arrangement, it is more effective to rotate the whole body of the robot than only its head.

Auctions, both traditional and electronic, are a pervasive social organisation for the valuation and exchange of goods and services. Despite the long-standing interest in integrating internet contributions into the more traditional auction such initiatives have remained problematic. We consider the organization of interaction of sales of fine art and antiques and develop a prototype 'intelligent' gavel system that is designed to enhance remote participation and ease the flexible ways in which internet contributions are legitimately integrated into live auctions. We present the findings of a quasi-naturalistic experiment involving the use of the system by auctioneers and its consequences for the general development of technologies to support internet participation in live co-located events.

When people communicate in their native languages using machine translation, they face various problems in constructing common ground. This study investigates the difficulties of constructing common ground when multiparty groups (consisting of more than two language communities) communicate using machine translation. We compose triads whose members come from three different language communities--China, Korea, and Japan--and compare their referential communication under two conditions: in their shared second language (English) and in their native languages using machine translation. Consequently, our study suggests the importance of not only grounding between speaker and addressee but also grounding between addressees in constructing effective machine-translation-mediated communication. Furthermore, to successfully build common ground between addressees, it seems important for them to be able to monitor what is going on between a speaker and other addressees.

If robot systems are being deployed in real world settings with untrained users who happen to accidentally pass by or could leave at any moment in time, then this places specific demands on the robot system: it needs to secure and maintain the user's engagement. In this, a common and critical problem consists of entering into a `focused encounter'. It requires each interactional partner to closely react upon the other's actions on a very fine-grained level engaging in a stepwise and dynamic process of mutual adjustments. We report initial findings from a study in which we have developed a preliminary, simple solution to this problem inspired by work from Conversation Analysis. Using this as an instrument to explore the impact of a `contingent' (CE) vs. `non-contingent entry' (NCE), we find that users who enter into the interaction in a dynamic and contingent manner show a significantly different way of interacting with the robot than the NCE group.

As research over the last several decades has shown that non-verbal actions such as face and head movement play a crucial role in human interaction, such resources are also likely to play an important role in human-robot interaction. In developing a robotic system that employs embodied resources such as face and head movement, we cannot simply program the robot to move at random but rather we need to consider the ways these actions may be timed to specific points in the talk. This paper discusses our work in developing a museum guide robot that moves its head at interactionally significant points during its explanation of an exhibit. In order to proceed, we first examined the coordination of verbal and non-verbal actions in human guide-visitor interaction. Based on this analysis, we developed a robot that moves its head at interactionally significant points in its talk. We then conducted several experiments to examine human participant non-verbal responses to the robot's head and gaze turns. Our results show that participants are likely to display non-verbal actions, and do so with precision timing, when the robot turns its head and gaze at interactionally significant points than when the robot turns its head at not interactionally significant points. Based on these findings, we propose several suggestions for the design of a guide robot.

In this paper we consider the development of a museum guide robot that has both autonomous and remotely controlled features. We focus on the capabilities such a robot could have to help focus the attention of a visitor on an object or artefact. Inspired by studies of social interaction, which investigate whether the robot could deploy "restarts" and "pauses" at certain moments in its talk to first elicit the visitor's attention/gaze towards the robot. We report an experiment where we deployed such a robot to interact with real visitors to a science museum. These experiments show that such a strategy does seem to have a significant impact on obtaining the visitor's gaze.

没入型VCSにおいて，座席配置とディスプレイとの相対位置の違いによって，話者の体躯の向きが変わることが観察され，それが話者交代，遠隔ユーザとの一体感，議論の満足度に深く影響を及ぼすことを発見した．

We are currently working on a museum guide robot with an emphasis on "friendly" human-robot interaction displayed through nonverbal behaviors. In this paper, we focus on head gestures during explanations of exhibits. The outline of our research is as follows. We first examined human head gestures through an experimental, sociological approach. From this research, we have discovered how human guides coordinate their head movement along with their talk when explaining exhibits. Second, we developed a robot system based on these findings. Third, we evaluated human-robot interaction, again using an experimental, sociological approach, and then modified the robot based on the results. Our experimental results suggest that robot head turning may lead to heightened engagement of museum visitors with the robot. Based on our preliminary findings, we will describe a museum guide robot that first works autonomously and, if necessary, can turn into remote-control mode operated by a human to engage in more complex interaction with visitors.

Recently a number of researchers have uncovered various ways in which paper documents support everyday work practice and have suggested how these may be reflected in the design of new technologies. In this paper we consider how activities on and around paper documents may be supported when participants are remote from each other. When we consider the uses of an experimental system that provides a number of resources for supporting work over documents, it becomes apparent how critical it is to support apparently simple pointing and referencing, and how complex such conduct can be. This suggests some considerations both for developers of enhanced media spaces and analysts of everyday conduct.Clarified descriptions of technology and fragments including changes to figures. Added points concerning the scope of the technology the conception of sequence and calrified the requirement regarding redundancy. Revised descriptions of fragments in an atempt to make thsee less dense Corrected several typographic errors including those mentioned by the reviewers' gesture.

The aim of our study is to investigate systems for supporting remote instruction via a mobile robot. In the real world, instructions are typically given through words and body orientations such as head movements, which make it possible to project others' actions. Projectability is an important resource in organizing multiple actions among multiple participants in co-ordination with one another. It can likewise be said that in the case of robot-human collaboration, it is necessary to design a robot's head so that a local participant can project the robot's (and remote person's) actions. GestureMan is a robot that is designed to support such projectability properties. It is argued that a remote controlled mobile robot, designed as a communication medium, makes relevant dual ecologies: ecology at a remote (robot operator's) site and at a local participant's (robot's) site. In order to design a robot as a viable communication medium, it is essential to consider how these ecologies can be mediated and supported.

In this paper we investigated systems for supporting remote collaboration using mobile robots as communication media. It is argued that the use of a remote-controlled robot as a device to support communication involves two distinct ecologies: an ecology at the remote (instructor's) site and an ecology at the operator's (robot) site. In designing a robot as a viable communication medium, it is essential to consider how these ecologies can be mediated and supported. In this paper, we propose design guidelines to overcome the problems inherent in dual ecologies, and describe the development of a robot named GestureMan-3 based on these guidelines. Our experiments with GestureMan-3 showed that the system supports sequential aspects of the organization of communication.

It is increasingly recognized that social interaction and collaboration rely on the participants' abilities to access and use a range of resources including objects and artifacts from within the immediate environment. In recent years, system support for remote collaboration has begun to address this issue, and we have witnessed the emergence of a number of technologies designed to provide remote participants with access to (features of) each others' environment. In this article we examine the use of one such system, an innovative mixed media environment designed to enable participants to refer to and point at objects and artifacts within each other's remote environment. The article addresses the ways in which participants use the system to undertake various collaborative activities and discusses the problems and issues that emerge, for the participants' themselves, in coordinating action with and through objects. We then consider these issues with regard to interaction and collaboration in more conventional environments such as work settings, and we discuss the ways in which the interpretation and production of action are inextricably embedded within the immediate environment, an environment of action that is inadvertently fractured in even this more sophisticated media space.

Drawing on studies of experimental systems and everyday settings we explore the relationship between social interaction and its environment. We show how interaction is inextricably embedded within its environment and discuss the ways in which innovative systems designed to support remote collaboration inadvertently fracture conduct from its setting, and undermine the participants abilities to produce, interpret and coordinate activities. We discuss the implications of these issues for the design of future systems, and, more critically, for studies of work and collaboration. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

When designing systems that support remote instruction on physical tasks, one must consider four requirements: 1) participants should be able to use non-verbal expressions, 2) they must be able to take an appropriate body arrangement to see and show gestures, 3) the instructor should be able to monitor operators and objects, 4) they must be able to organize the arrangement of bodies and tools and gestural expression sequentially and interactively. GestureMan was developed to satisfy these four requirements by using a mobile robot that embodies a remote instructors actions. The mobile robot mounts a camera and a remote control laser pointer on it. Based on the experiments with the system we discuss the advantage and disadvantage of the current implementation. Also, some implications to improve the system are described.

No abstract available.

A system which supports remote instruction for physical tasks in the real world should support following requirements: 1) flexibility of the body arrangement; 2) awareness of each other's orientations; and 3) communication of gestural information. To satisfy these requirements, we developed a system named "GestureMan". GestureMan is a mobile robot mounted with three cameras and a remotely controlled laser pointer on it. An instructor controls the robot remotely with a joystick and gives instruction to an operator. Two preliminary experiments using a low-speed Satellite link and high-speed ATM network respectively show that GestureMan has an ability to support the remote instruction. Furthermore, gigabit network enabled the natural interaction between the instructor and the operator by alleviating limitations such as time delay and narrow field of view.

In this paper, the collaboration in the real three-dimensional environment is defined as spatial workspace collaboration, and an experimental system, GestureCam, is presented which supports spatial workspace collaboration via a video-mediated communication. The GestureCam system has an ability to look around a remote site, an ability of remote pointing, and an ability to support gaze awareness, all of which are the essential system requirements for spatial workspace collaboration. The GestureCam consists of an actuator with three degrees of freedom and a video camera mounted on the actuator. The actuators can be controlled by a master-slave method, by a touch-sensitive CRT, or by a gyro sensor. Also, a laser pointer is mounted on an actuator to assist remote pointing. The experiments with human subjects are also shown in the video.

This paper describes a tele-machining and tele-handling system which enables multiple operators to machine and handle an object in a remote environment. Engineers will be able to work cooperatively using the system, even if they are located remotely. The system can also be used for tele-education. The paper describes key technologies for tele-machining predictive display of geometrical information, real-time machining surface display using multi-axis force information, predictive auditory information presentation as well as tactile presentation of machining state. Implementation of the system for multiple operators and results of experiments are also discussed.

An approach supporting spatial workspace collaboration via a video-mediated communication system is described. Based on experimental results, the following were determined to be the system requirements to support spatial workspace collaboration: independency of a field of view, predictability, confidence in transmission and sympathy toward the system. Additionally, a newly developed camera system, the GestureCam System, is introduced. A camera is mounted on an actuator with three degrees of freedom. It is controlled by master-slave method or by a touch-sensitive CRT. Also, a laser pointer is mounted to assist with remote pointing. Preliminary experiments were conducted and the results are described herein.

Collaboration in three-dimensional space: “spatial workspace collaboration” is introduced and an approach supporting its use via a video mediated communication system is described. Verbal expression analysis is primarily focused on. Based on experiment results, movability of a focal point, sharing focal points, movability of a shared workspace, and the ability to confirm viewing intentions and movements were determined to be system requirements necessary to support spatial workspace collaboration. A newly developed SharedView system having the capability to support spatial workspace collaboration is also introduced, tested, and some experimental results described.