Broadening Participation for Remote Communities: Situated Distance Telepresence

Our work is concerned with how embodied communication involving speech and gestures may be mediated through mobile tele-robotics and augmented reality to support hands-on distance mentoring. Following work in the psycholinguistics of embodied communication (e.g., meaning is expressed through gesture, gaze, and speech), a four design-implement-test-deploy-evaluate study was undertaken. We investigated whether and how powerful multimodal language to support explanation and mentoring may be mediated over distance through the designs.