9. The BEAMING Proxy: Towards Virtual Clones for Communication

Participants of virtual worlds and video games are often represented by animated avatars and telerobotics allows users to be remotely represented by physical robots. In many cases such avatars or robots can also be controlled by fully-automated agents. We present a conceptual framework for a communication proxy that unifies these two modes of communication. The users can communicate via their avatar or robotic representation, an autonomous agent can occasionally take control of the representation, or the user and the autonomous agent can share the control of the representation. The transition between modes is done seamlessly throughout a communication session, and many aspects of the representation can be transformed online, allowing for new types of human computer confluence. We describe the concept of the communication proxy that has been developed and explored within the European Union BEAMING project, and describe one of the studies involving the proxy, in which the experimenter was perceived as both a man and a woman simultaneously.

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