From Being There to Watching: Shared and Dedicated Telepresence Robot Usage at Academic Conferences

Telepresence attendance at academic conferences is now a reality and allows people who cannot attend in person with the opportunity to still be "present." This is valuable for people who face accessibility challenges, cost or travel restrictions, or limited time for travel. We have deployed and studied the use of telepresence robots at three ACM conferences, Ubicomp/ISWC 2014, CSCW 2016, and CHI 2016, ranging from remote users having dedicated telepresence robots to users sharing telepresence robots both synchronously and asynchronously. In this article, we report on the telepresence offerings along with the user behaviors, experiences, and the social norms found for remote conference attendance. Our results across the studies focus around three main themes: shared vs. dedicated robot usage, identity presentation and the value and challenges associated with it; and local in-person support through proxies and instant messaging backchannels. These themes point to three different areas of design exploration for telepresence robots, pointing out the limitations of existing design solutions with respect to each theme, areas for future telepresence design work, and the value in considering varied telepresence robot solutions, including both dedicated and shared telepresence robots.