SIGGRAPH: G: Layered Telepresence: Simultaneous Multi Presence Experience sing Eye Gaze based Perceptual Awareness Blending

This paper proposes a novel technique to expand visual perception in Telexistence systems from a single location to multiple locations. Layered Telepresence (LT) expands perceptual awareness of human modalities by using the concept of layered perception. Telexistence based robots are used as the representation of the user, and are considered as perceptual layers containing the visual, auditory, and haptic feedback information. From each layer, saliency information is extracted and used as an indication of where the interesting regions are located at, these information are necessary for attention localization. Eye gaze is used as an input modality for weighting the layers based on the saliency map corresponding to each layer. Based on these weighted information, the layers are blended together into the same visual space and are presented to the user in a single visual space. Using this method of eye gaze based perceptual blending, we can expand user’s visual awareness to multiple locations simultaneously as if the user is being ubiquitous. Here we describe the design of the proposed system as well as several applications using it.