Social Tele-Embodiment: Understanding Presence

Humans live and interact within the real world but our current online world neglects this. This paper explores research into Personal Roving Presence (PRoP) devices that provide a physical mobile proxy, controllable over the Internet to provide tele-embodiment. Leveraging off of its physical presence in the remote space, PRoPs provide important human verbal and non-verbal communication cues. The ultimate goal is a computer mediated communication (CMC) tool for rich natural human interaction beyond currently available systems. This paper examines PRoP design choices, system architecture, social issues, and evaluations of several user studies.