Enforced Telexistence
MHD Yamen Saraiji∗, Yusuke Mizushina, Charith Lasantha Fernando,
Masahiro Furukawa, Youichi Kamiyama, Kouta Minamizawa, Susumu Tachi
Graduate School of Media Design, Keio University, Japan

Figure 1: (a) Local-Remote Collaborative Whiteboard, (b)Natural Social Interaction with Others, (c) Grabbing a Functional Virtual Copyof TV Remote1Introduction

Telexistence [Tachi 2010] systems require physical limbs for remote object manipulation [Fernando et al. 2012]. Having arms andhands synchronized with voluntary movements it allows a user tofeel the robot‘s body as his own body through visual, auditory, andhaptic sensation. With Enforced Telexistence, we introduce a novel
technique that provides virtual arms for existing telexistence systems that does not have any arms and allow the user to have anexperience of embodied enforcement towards the remote environment. This virtual extended arms can be extended to touch and feel
remote objects that is unreachable. When the user touches a remoteobject, a functional virtual copy will pop-up and interface between
virtual and the remote world. Enforced Telexistence not only allows a user to experience a non existing arm in telexistence, butalso allows to enforce remote environment in various ways.

HMDTrackingMarkersBinauralMicrophones

DepthSense
Data Glove

3 DOF HeadFull HD
CamerasVirtual Hands

Robot Base

PressurePad

Figure 2: System Overview

2System Description

To realize the concept, we used a Master/Slave Robot system called“TELUBee” a human sized ubiquitous telexistence robot which
synchronizes with the users head movements and leg movements
using a Motion Tracking System (OptiTrack) and a Pressure Pad(Wii Fit). The robot uses two binaural microphones and two FullHD web cameras for audio and video transmission.
User can perceive the presence of his body by real-time superimposing virtual arms which are mapped to his own arms kinematics [Saraiji et al. 2013]. Eye-to-hand vector is maintained between
his physical body and the virtual body.
As shown in Fig 2, a depth sensor array (PrimeSense) mounted on
the robots head allows the user to scan the remote environment in
3D space and calculate the collision point between the depth map
and the eye-to-hand vector. Thus it can measure the vertical and∗ e-mail: yamen@kmd.keio.ac.jp

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SIGGRAPH 2014, August 10 – 14, 2014, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
2014 Copyright held by the Owner/Author.
ACM 978-1-4503-2958-3/14/08

shearing forces acting on virtual fingertips and display on the users
fingertips. Robot and user are connected with a IP network wherethe connection is initiated with a server-client network architecture.

Acknowledgement
This project is supported by JSPS-Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research A (23240017)

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