Towards Mobile Embodied 3D Avatar as Telepresence Vehicle

Abstract

In this paper, we present mobile embodied 3D avatar to shift a rich experience of avatar from a virtual world to our real life with a new style of telepresence. Conventional telepresence research have focused on the exact re-creation of face-to-face communication at a fixed position in a specialized room, so there have been much less research on a life-sized mobile telepresence system despite many off-the-shelf mobile telepresence robots available. We propose various scalable holographic displays to visualize a life-sized avatar in an actual life. In addition, we introduce architecture to control embodied avatar according to user’s intention by extending popular architecture for a multimodal virtual human, namely SAIBA. Our primitive prototype system was tested with 5 simple avatar animations to embody with a wheeled platform robot and a life-sized transparent holographic display and proved realistic avatar’s movement complying user’s intention and the situation at the remote location of avatar.