We present ChameleonControl, a real-human teleoperation system for scalable remote instruction in hands-on classrooms. In contrast to existing video or AR/VR-based remote hands-on education, ChameleonControl uses a real human as a surrogate of a remote instructor. Building on existing human-based telepresence approaches, we contribute a novel method to teleoperate a human surrogate through synchronized mixed reality hand gestural navigation and verbal communication. By overlaying the remote instructor’s virtual hands in the local user’s MR view, the remote instructor can guide and control the local user as if they were physically present. This allows the local user/surrogate to synchronize their hand movements and gestures with the remote instructor, effectively teleoperating a real human. We deploy and evaluate our system in classrooms of physiotherapy training, as well as other application domains such as mechanical assembly, sign language and cooking lessons. The study results confirm that our approach can increase engagement and the sense of co-presence, showing potential for the future of remote hands-on classrooms.

This paper introduces HoloBots, a mixed reality remote collaboration system that augments holographic telepresence with synchronized mobile robots. Beyond existing mixed reality telepresence, HoloBots lets remote users not only be visually and spatially present, but also physically engage with local users and their environment. HoloBots allows the users to touch, grasp, manipulate, and interact with the remote physical environment as if they were co-located in the same shared space. We achieve this by synchronizing holographic user motion (Hololens 2 and Azure Kinect) with tabletop mobile robots (Sony Toio). Beyond the existing physical telepresence, HoloBots contributes to an exploration of broader design space, such as object actuation, virtual hand physicalization, world-in-miniature exploration, shared tangible interfaces, embodied guidance, and haptic communication. We evaluate our system with twelve participants by comparing it with hologram-only and robot-only conditions. Both quantitative and qualitative results confirm that our system significantly enhances the level of co-presence and shared experience, compared to the other conditions.

This paper introduces Sketched Reality, an approach that combines AR sketching and actuated tangible user interfaces (TUI) for bi-directional sketching interaction. Bi-directional sketching enables virtual sketches and physical objects to “affect” each other through physical actuation and digital computation. In the existing AR sketching, the relationship between virtual and physical worlds is only one-directional — while physical interaction can affect virtual sketches, virtual sketches have no return effect on the physical objects or environment. In contrast, bi-directional sketching interaction allows the seamless coupling between sketches and actuated TUIs. In this paper, we employ tabletop-size small robots (Sony Toio) and an iPad-based AR sketching tool to demonstrate the concept. In our system, virtual sketches drawn and simulated on an iPad (e.g., lines, walls, pendulums, and springs) can move, actuate, collide, and constrain physical Toio robots, as if virtual sketches and the physical objects exist in the same space through seamless coupling between AR and robot motion. This paper contributes a set of novel interactions and a design space of bi-directional AR sketching. We demonstrate a series of potential applications, such as tangible physics education, explorable mechanism, tangible gaming for children, and in-situ robot programming via sketching.