Vibration-based interface for remote object manipulation in video conference system

A number of commercial or free systems are available, and a user can easily setup an environment for video meeting/conference, as the increasing demand on video conference/meeting for business or technical meetings. The main objective of these system is, however, to provide an environment for audio/video communication for participants and is not suitable to share a common virtual space, where participants can work furthermore collaboratively just like a face-to-face meeting. What we are pursuing in this study is to develop a collaborative environment, where participants can share a common virtual space for collaborative work. Just like typical meetings, what we only need is a typical whiteboard to setup this environment so that participants should have the same feeling just like attending a typical meeting. However, what the participants can do is not only to write down some memo on a whiteboard, but also to control computers to hold a video conference, and even to manipulate teleoperation in the same environment. To set up this environment, we have developed CALAVIS system as the main video conference module, BOCOLLA system for whiteboard interface, and a sample teleoperation model to be used in our experiments. In this study, we have implemented a vibration-based interface, which can also be incorporated in our collaborative video conference environment. This work describes the overview of these subsystems and model, explains what we can do in this environments to show the approach in this study, and presents the direction towards which the study is going.