Tangible Media Group

We propose a new approach to physical telepresence, based on shared workspaces with the ability to capture and remotely render the shapes of people and objects. In this paper, we describe the concept of shape transmission, and propose interaction techniques to manipulate remote physical objects and physical renderings of shared digital content. We investigate, how the representation of user's body parts can be altered to amplify their capabilities for teleoperation and describe our finding of building and testing prototype physical telepresence workspaces. A preliminary evaluation found users were able to manipulate simple objects remotely, and found many different techniques for manipulation that highlight the expressive nature of our system.