An Attention-Directed Robot for Social Telepresence

摘要

Abstract: In this paper, we present an attention-directed robot with audiovisual attention control system for telepresence applications. The robot is able to automatically direct attention to the person of interest Attention direction is based on an integration of 3D speech source localization and visual face tracking. To study the effect of automatic attention direction on the telepresence experience, we conducted a user study for a video-conferencing session between two groups of participants in two separate rooms. The users ’ responses show that, in the presence of automatic attention direction, the feeling of presence (i.e. that a remote person is in the same room) increases, the ease of show and tell increases, and the flow of the video-conferencing communications is smoother. These results suggest that the attention-directed robot can enhance social telepresence. 1