Telepresence is the appearance or sensation of a person being present at a place other than their true location, via telerobotics or video.
Telepresence requires that the users' senses interact with specific stimuli in order to provide the feeling of being in that other location. Additionally, users may be given the ability to affect the remote location. In this case, the user's position, movements, actions, voice, etc. may be sensed to transmit and duplicate in the remote location to bring about this effect. Therefore information may be traveling in both directions between the user and the remote location.
A popular application is found in telepresence videoconferencing, the highest possible level of videotelephony. Telepresence via video deploys greater technical sophistication and improved fidelity of both sight and sound than in traditional videoconferencing. Technical advancements in mobile collaboration have also extended the capabilities of videoconferencing beyond the boardroom for use with hand-held mobile devices, enabling collaboration independent of location.
A similar or identical concept is telexistence, which was first proposed by Susumu Tachi in Japan in 1980S.Tachi, K.Tanie and K.Komoriya: Evaluation device of mobility aids for the blind, Japanese Patent 1462696 filed on December 26, 1980. and 1981S.Tachi, K.Tanie and K.Komoriya: Operation method of manipulators with sensoryinformation display functions, Japanese Patent 1458263 filed on January 14, 1981. as patents and the first report was published in Japanese in 1982S.Tachi and M.Abe: Study on Telexistence (I) -Desigan of Visual Display-, Proceedings of the 21st SICE Annual Conference, pp.167-168, Tokyo, July 28–30, 1982. and in English in 1984.
History
In a pioneering paper, the U.S. cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky attributed the development of the idea of telepresence to science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein: "My first vision of a remote-controlled economy came from Robert A. Heinlein's prophetic 1948 novel, Waldo," wrote Minsky. In his science fiction short story "Waldo" (1942), Heinlein first proposed a primitive telepresence master-slave manipulator system.
The Brother Assassin, written by Fred Saberhagen in 1969, introduced the complete concept for a telepresence master-slave humanoid system. In the novel, the concept is described as follows: "And a moment later it seemed to all his senses that he had been transported from the master down into the body of the slave-unit standing beneath it on the floor. As the control of its movements passed over to him, the slave started gradually to lean to one side, and he moved its foot to maintain balance as naturally as he moved his own. Tilting back his head, he could look up through the slave's eyes to see the master-unit, with himself inside, maintaining the same attitude on its complex suspension."
The term telepresence, a neologism due to the futurist Patrick Gunkel, was introduced to the public in a 1980 article by Minsky, who outlined his vision for an adapted version of the older concept of teleoperation that focused on giving a remote participant a feeling of actually being present at a different location. One of the first systems to create a fully immersive illusion of presence in a remote location was the Virtual Fixtures platform developed in 1992 at the U.S. Air Force's Armstrong Labs by inventor Louis Rosenberg. The system included stereoscopic image display from the remote environment as well as immersive touch feedback using a full upper-body exoskeleton.
The first commercially successful telepresence company, Teleport (which was later renamed TeleSuite), was founded in 1993 by David Allen and Herold Williams.Human Productivity Lab Whitepaper Before TeleSuite, they ran a resort business from which the original concept emerged because they often found businesspeople would have to cut their stays short to participate in important meetings. Their idea was to develop a technology that would allow businesspeople to attend their meetings without leaving the resorts so that they could lengthen their hotel stays.
Hilton Hotels had originally licensed to install them in their hotels throughout the United States and other countries, but use was low. The idea lost momentum, with Hilton eventually backing out. TeleSuite later began to focus less on the hospitality industry and more on business-oriented telepresence systems. Shareholders eventually held enough stock to replace the company's original leadership, which ultimately led to its collapse. David Allen purchased all of the assets of TeleSuite and appointed Scott Allen as president of the new company called Destiny Conferencing.
Destiny Conferencing licensed its patent portfolio to HP which became the first large company to join the telepresence industry, soon followed by others such as Cisco and Polycom (now called Poly). After forming a distribution agreement with Pleasanton-based Polycom (now Poly), Destiny Conferencing sold on January 5, 2007, to Polycom (now Poly) for $60 million.
A telepresence research project started in 1990. Located at the University of Toronto, the Ontario Telepresence Project (OTP) was an interdisciplinary effort involving social sciences and engineering. Its final report stated that it "...was a three year, $4.8 million pre-competitive research project whose mandate was to design and field trial advanced media space systems in a variety of workplaces in order to gain insights into key sociological and engineering issues. The OTP, which has ended in December 1994, was part of the International Telepresence Project which linked Ontario researchers to their counterparts in four European nations. The Project's major sponsor was the Government of Ontario, through two of its Centres of Excellence—the Information Technology Research Centre (ITRC) and the Telecommunications Research Institute of Ontario (TRIO)."
Benefits An industry expert described some benefits of telepresence: "There were four drivers for our decision to do more business over video and telepresence. We wanted to reduce our travel spend, reduce our carbon footprint and environmental impact, improve our employees' work/life balance, and improve employee productivity.".Companies Worldwide Rely on Polycom Video and Telepresence to Cut Carbon Emissions for a Greener Planet , CNN June 5, 2008
Rather than traveling great distances in order to have a face-face meeting, it is now commonplace to use a telepresence system instead, which uses a multiple codec video system (which is what the word "telepresence" most currently represents). Each member/party of the meeting uses a telepresence room to "dial in" and can see/talk to every other member on a screen/screens as if they were in the same room. This brings enormous time and cost benefits. It is also superior to phone conferencing (except in cost), as the visual aspect greatly enhances communications, allowing for perceptions of facial expressions and other body languages.
Mobile collaboration systems combine the use of video, audio and on-screen drawing capabilities using newest generation hand-held mobile devices to enable multi-party conferencing in real-time, independent of location. Benefits include cost-efficiencies resulting from accelerated problem resolution, reductions in downtimes and travel, improvements in customer service and increased productivity.
Implementation
Telepresence has been described as the human experience of being fully present at a live real-world location remote from one's own physical location. Someone experiencing video telepresence would therefore be able to behave and receive stimuli as if part of a meeting at the remote site. The aforementioned would result in interactive participation of group activities that would bring benefits to a wide range of users.Video Conferencing: A guide to making a Telepresence Business Case Matt Walker, 2007
Implementation of human sensory elements
To provide a telepresence experience, technologies are required that implement the human sensory elements of vision, sound, and manipulation.
Vision and sound
A minimum system usually includes visual feedback. Ideally, the entire field of view of the user is filled with a view of the remote location, and the viewpoint corresponds to the movement and orientation of the user's head. In this way, it differs from television or cinema, where the viewpoint is out of the control of the viewer.
In order to achieve this, the user may be provided with either a very large (or wraparound) screen, or small displays mounted directly in front of the eyes. The latter provides a particularly convincing 3D sensation. The movements of the user's head must be sensed, and the camera must mimic those movements accurately and in real time. This is important to prevent unintended motion sickness.
Another source of future improvement to telepresence displays, compared by some to holograms, is a projected display technology featuring life-sized imagery.
High fidelity sound reproduction builds on telephone technology dating back more than 130 years, and high fidelity audio equipment has been commercially available for decades. Stereophonic sound is able to reproduce spatial characteristics of sound that monaural sound does not.
Manipulation
The ability to manipulate a remote object or environment is an important aspect for some telepresence users and can be implemented in a large number of ways depending on the needs of the user. Typically, the movements of the user's hands (position in space and posture of the fingers) are sensed by wired gloves, inertial sensors, or absolute spatial position sensors. A robot in the remote location then copies those movements as closely as possible. This ability is also known as teleoperation.
The more closely the robot re-creates the form factor of the human hand, the greater the sense of telepresence. The complexity of robotic effectors varies greatly, from simple one axis grippers, to fully anthropomorphic robot hands.
Haptic teleoperation refers to a system that provides some sort of tactile force feedback to the user, so the user feels some approximation of the weight, firmness, size, and/or texture of the remote objects manipulated by the robot. A new form of technology, called collaborative telepresence, is currently being developed which will eventually be used to collaborate with others while seeming like you are in the same room as the other person, keeping a normal social distance. Collaborative telepresence uses haptic sensors like these to allow a sense of touch.
Freedom of movement
The prevalence of high quality video conferencing using mobile devices, tablets and portable computers has enabled considerable growth in telepresence robots to help give a better sense of remote physical presence for communication and collaboration in the office, home or school when one cannot be there in person. The robot avatar can move or look around at the command of the remote person. Drivable telepresence robots – typically contain a display (integrated or separate phone or tablet) mounted on a roaming base. Some examples of roaming telepresence robots include Beam by Suitable Technologies, Double by Double Robotics, Ava Telepresence by Ava Robotics, Anybots, Vgo, TeleMe by Mantarobot, and Romo by Romotive.
More modern roaming telepresence robots may include an ability to operate autonomously. The robots can map out the space and be able to avoid obstacles while driving themselves between rooms and their docking stations.
Effectiveness