This paper describes a case study wherein we realized a novel remote shopping experience by using T-Leap, a wearable telepresence system with an integrated 360° camera, to connect a supermarket in the city center with elderly participants living far from the store. The participants of our case study operated T-Leap via a PC/tablet and remotely joined a surrogate shopper to explore the supermarket and shop for products. In this study, we revealed that a real-time 360° view provides opportunities for accidental, serendipitous purchasing activities, despite being difficult for the elderly participants to control. Reflecting on our findings, we discuss the design of future remote shopping services from an HCI perspective. Our design implications will contribute to assisting people who have difficulties regularly shopping for their daily needs, like our participants, have rich, in-store experiences that have never been provided by existing online shopping services.

Outdoor activities, such as traveling and sightseeing, become challenging to realize when individuals are geographically distant. This paper introduces Syn-Leap, a symmetrical wearable telepresence system designed to allow multiple users to explore outdoor settings while mutually sharing their environments. With Syn-Leap, users wear a 360° camera and AR glasses, allowing them to share their environment through video streaming while simultaneously viewing the videos of other users while walking outdoors. To investigate the experiences and communication generated by this system, we conducted a field study in Kyoto, Japan, focusing on tourism scenarios. The results revealed that participants could achieve a sense of walking together by seamlessly switching between exploring their own environment and viewing the video feeds of other users, occasionally overlaying the AR content from other users onto their own environment.

The tactile sensation of textiles is critical in determining the comfort of clothing. For remote use, such as online shopping, users cannot physically touch the textile of clothes, making it difficult to evaluate its tactile sensation. Tactile sensing and actuation devices are required to transmit the tactile sensation of textiles. The sensing device needs to recognize different garments, even with hand-held sensors. In addition, the existing actuation device can only present a limited number of known patterns and cannot transmit unknown tactile sensations of textiles. To address these issues, we propose Telextiles, an interface that can remotely transmit tactile sensations of textiles by creating a latent space that reflects the proximity of textiles through contrastive self-supervised learning. We confirm that textiles with similar tactile features are located close to each other in the latent space through a two-dimensional plot. We then compress the latent features for known textile samples into the 1D distance and apply the 16 textile samples to the rollers in the order of the distance. The roller is rotated to select the textile with the closest feature if an unknown textile is detected.