HomeMeld: Co-present Robotic Avatar System for Illusion of Living Together

Real-time remote interaction in work-separated families has become easier and richer by recent advances in mobile computing, yet it is still far from achieving a sense of living together. Imagine family members living apart are mutually co-present in each other’s home with their avatars that all the activities and movements are intelligently mirrored in the other’s living space. Such co-presence brings many pseudo living-together experiences, which are incomparable to those of today’s remote face-to-face communication. We develop an initial prototype, HomeMeld, a device-free self-mobile robotic system serving as a real-time, co-present avatar to create an illusion of living together. HomeMeld is built on top of a commercial telepresence robot hardware [1] and a CNN-based computer vision technique, letting a person be device-free at all times as like as she is at home. In this demo, we present the motivation behind our work, the end-to-end operation of HomeMeld, and the vision of giving a sense of living together to the family living apart.