Local-Sound Visualizations for Presence Control of Telepresence Robots

Abstract

We propose two local-sound visualizations for telep-resence robots to make presence-control and perception-control easier. One is a visualization of local-sound direction to find local participants. The other is a visualization of spatial spread of remote-operators' voice amplified by the loudspeaker in a local site. To verify the effectiveness of these methods, a remote-controlled robot was developed, 24 subjects played a simple voice game via the robot. Temporal indicators for playing the game and questionnaires confirmed that the two methods contributed to usability, and the former method reduces the time of a remote-operator to discover local participants by half.