Avatar-mediated contact interaction between remote users for social telepresence

Abstract

Social touch such as a handshake increases the sense of coexistence and closeness between remote users in a social telepresence environment, but creating such coordinated contact movements with a distant person is extremely difficult if given only visual feedback, without haptic feedback. This paper presents a method to enable hand-contact interaction between remote users in an avatar-mediated telepresence environment. The key approach is, while the avatar directly follows its owner's motion in normal conditions, it adjusts the pose to maintain contact with the other user when the two users attempt to make contact interaction. To this end, we develop classifiers to recognize the users' intention for the contact interaction. The contact classifier identifies whether the users try to initiate contact when they are not in contact, and the separation classifier identifies whether the two in contact attempt to break contact. The classifiers are trained based on a set of geometric distance features. During the contact phase, inverse kinematics is solved to determine the pose of the avatar's arm so as to initiate and maintain natural contact with the other user's hand. Our system is unique in that two remote users can perform real time hand contact interaction in a social telepresence environment.