Telepresence Chameleon: Improve User Experience of Telepresence Robot With Chameleon Effect

Non-verbal communication is an essential part of both human-human and human-robot interaction. The chameleon effect, unlike facial expressions or gestures, is a special one in non-verbal communication because of its nature that both the person conveying this effect and other interaction partners should not be conscious of it. With remote meetings becoming common in people's work and daily life, it has been generally aware that the need of improving the experience of remote meetings is increasing. This paper proposed a system, named Telepresence Chameleon, which implements the chameleon effect on the telepresence robots. Telepresence Chameleon applies the chameleon effect to the telepresence robots' video stream as real-time feedback according to users' movements and restrains it in a subtle range such that users are kept unconscious of it. The result of the experiments shows that Telepresence Chameleon provided a better user experience than a normal telepresence robot.