Physical Telepresence: Shape Capture and Display for Embodied, Computer-mediated Remote Collaboration - Reaction

This article talked about how we can interact with each other in remote locations through physical telepresence. This will hopefully solve the problem of being able to give someone a handshake in another country. And many other things like that. The goal of physical telepresence is to extend the physical embodiment of remote participants and combine it with the physical embodiment of remote TUIs. This article talked about a few examples of this by explaining a few telemanipulation scenarios. These are Video Mediated Communication (used for collaborative websites and family communication), Mixed Reality (Large spatial environments that can create collaborative workspaces that can give users an experience of immersion in certain environment), Telerobotics ( Representing remote people with telepresence). Telemanipulation can be used to handle hazardous materials or other objects from a distance. It can also be used for surgeons for more precise control to remove tremors. This is why it is important to study and design physical telepresence and manipulation because it can expand human capabilities. We primarily emphasize the potential in interactions with shared digital models of arbitrary shapes, linked physical objects, and manipulation of remote objects through direct gesture. Using shape capture and display, users can reach through the network and pick up a remote physical object. This is called Direct Gesture Control and it allows a user to interact directly with a remote tangible object though transmitted physical embodiment. Tangible Tokens are the term used to represent a remote tangible object. As a user moves the token, the model of the remote object is updated, and the remote object is moved to reflect the changed state. Tangible tokens can be updated and transformed with activity like scaling, translation, rotations, shearing, stretching and other distortions. They talked about some problems with direct gesture control and what they did to fix it. As the physical shape rendering contains some noise and the motors require a certain time to reach their target position, our detection algorithm thresholds the deformation image and compensates for the time delay. That is something to keep in mind when designing for physical telepresence.