TeleVIP: On-site Person Removal and Context Distillation Platform for Dedicated Telepresence Experience

For the application of telepresence robots, the on-site person usually has been regarded as a main element in remote interaction. However, in the context of a remote tour, the visual presence of an on-site person unexpectedly interrupting a robot’s view may worsen the remote visitor’s viewing experience. Moreover, the presence of a telepresence robot with its camera on may arise the privacy concerns of an on-site person. In this sense, we developed TeleVIP, a platform that provides telepresence applications with easy-to-use APIs to remove the figures of on-site people and selectively distill the useful information from the presence or context of on-site people, according to the application’s demand. We implemented a working prototype of TeleVIP and performed pilot experiments in terms of both quantitative metrics and qualitative results, indicating the preliminary usability and feasibility of TeleVIP.