RemoteCoDe: Robotic Embodiment for Enhancing Peripheral Awareness in a Remote Collaborative Task

Many collaborative design activities are centered around a shared artifact such as a low fidelity model of a building, or a circuit implemented on a breadboard. In such settings, collocation is extremely valuable as participants can easily infer each other’s focus of attention through peripheral awareness. These cues are often lost in traditional video conferencing systems such as Zoom. In this paper, we present an embodied remote presence system designed to support design activities that involve a physical artifact by enhancing peripheral awareness. In our system, a remote user's focus of attention is tracked by an iPhone's TruthDepth camera and rendered locally using an articulated display. Our implementation can track the wide range of head movements that occur when one switches attention between a physical artifact, a laptop, and their collaborator. To support possible discrepency between local and remote layout, head movements are remapped as robotic movements to correspond to these key elements in the local user's space. We report on the results of an evaluation characterizing the system's remapping accuracy and its ability to support peripheral awareness of a remote participant's locus of attention.