Ambient Telepresence

Ambient Telepresence is introduced as a method to give someone the feeling that someone else is present while that person is in fact not co-located. In contrast to other telepresence approaches, ambient telepresence is focused on mediating background activity to promote a peripheral sense of presence. A remote person’s handling of everyday objects is mapped to an ambient presentation in the local work environment, based on ubiquitous computing and context-awareness technologies, allowing people at different locations to experience the ambient presence of others. For experimentation, we have developed MediaCups, coffee cups in our office environment equipped with sensor, computing and communication facilities.