Integrating Socio-Affective Information in Physical Perception Aimed to Telepresence Robots

Abstract

The aim of telepresence robotics is to provide the users with ubiquitous social immersion. It implies giving the teleoperators a proprioceptive sense of the social signals they exchange with their remote interlocutors. In particular, they need the sound volume of the telepresence robot to be adjust so it is appropriate to the acoustic conditions in the remote space. However, this intensity adjustment could conflict with the socio-affects expressed by the teleoperator and makes them unrecognizable or inconsistent with the behaviour of the telepresence robot. It would be therefore interesting to control not only voice intensity, but the “social value” of the vocal signal, so the eventual artefacts of telecommunication could be counterbalanced. To this end, we propose an experiment for measuring, analyzing and modeling how people perceive their interlocutor spatially, according to proxemics and socio-affective variations. The used methodology is based on a “hidden camera” scenario to achieve ecological measures of human acoustic perception. Contrary to our primary hypothesis, we could not find any correlation between the perceived distance and expressed socio-affect because of a great inter-subjects variability. However, there is a clear effect of socio-affect and intensity on the perception of orientation.