SSA - 2023

The second International Workshop on Symbiotic Society with Avatars (SSA) with the theme of "Beyond Space and Time", was held on March 13th in Stockholm Sweden as part of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. As organizers, we find it a huge success as we achieved our intended goals. In particular, to shape a multidisciplinary community around the idea of Avatars. We gathered around 30 participants in hybrid from different backgrounds such as Robotics, Communication, Mixed Reality, etc. On this page do a quick report of the workshop. Please feel free to contact us for more information.

Overview

Avatar robots can help people extend their physical, cognitive, and perceptual capabilities, allowing people to exceed time and space constraints. In that sense, avatar robots can greatly influence people's lives. However, we have many challenges to be addressed in various scenarios such as avatar-human interaction, operator-avatar interaction, avatar-avatar interaction, ethical and legal issues, technical challenges, and so on. It is indispensable to discuss what the necessary research and technologies are to realize avatars that are well accepted in society while envisioning a future symbiotic society in which people communicate with other people and their avatars. In this workshop, our aim is to provide an opportunity for researchers from different backgrounds including social robotics, teleoperation, and mixed reality to come together and discuss the advances and values in a symbiotic society with avatars. The organizers team are:

Keynote Speakers

Julie A. Adams

Oregon State University

ANA Avatar XPRIZE: Objectives, Outcomes and Insights

The $10M ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition was designed to push the boundaries of human-robot interaction. Specifically, the intent was for the competing teams to develop multi-modal interactive capabilities that allow the human operator of a teleoperated system to transport their presence to a remote location. The prize competition began in March 2018. Thirty-eight teams participated in the semifinals, and twenty teams were selected for the very challenging finals competition in December 2022. This presentation will review the objectives of the competition, discuss the semi-finals competition trials, the finals challenge and outcomes, as well as important research insights.

Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson

Reykjavík University

Can Your Avatar Be More Than Just a Remote Puppet?

In some of my early work in the late 90s I proposed that graphical avatars representing users in online virtual worlds and chat systems should automatically animate a range of nonverbal cues to support social engagement and interaction. The idea was to address a major problem with online avatars at the time: They had to be explicitly controlled via mouse and keyboard in front of a monitor. This meant that a lot of the subtle and spontaneous human behavior supporting social interaction was lost. Today we can socialize in online virtual worlds using powerful but affordable VR devices that dramatically change how avatars are handled. In VR, our own movements are translated to that of the avatar instead of relying on keyboards and mice. We furthermore communicate using our own natural voice, rather than composing and transmitting text. At first glance, one might therefore dismiss the whole idea of avatar automation, since our natural and spontaneous behavior is effortlessly mimicked by the avatar. However, there are a few reasons we may still want to consider making the VR avatar capable of autonomously animating helpful social behavior. In this talk I will first review the results from the early online avatar automation work, and then outline and discuss some of the issues with current VR avatars that automation may help address.

Organizing Members

Hooman Hedayati

Kyoto University

Stela H. Seo

Kyoto University

Takayuki Kanda

Kyoto University

Daniel J. Rea

University of New Brunswick

Sean Andrist

Microsoft Research

Yukiko Nakano

Seikei University

Hiroshi Ishiguro

Osaka University

There were six organizers talk, which the following oganizers shared their take on the future of Avatars:

Avatar and the Future Society -By Hiroshi Ishiguro
Towards AI "Copilots" for Situated Task Assistance in the Physical World - By Sean Andrist
Avatar Nonverbal Signals in Impression Forming - By Yukiko Nakano
Social Teleoperation and Challenges for Avatar Robots - By Daniel J. Rea
Future with Avatar Robots - By Takayuki Kanda
Social Navigation - By Stela H. Seo

Accepted Papers

Two reviewers, reviewed the submitted papers to the workshop. 5 papers got accepted, however one of the papers got withdrawn due to visa issues. The follwoing papers got accepted. These papers will be presented in the workshop. This following papers presented in the workshop.

A Pipeline for Generating Optimized Individually Tailored Animated Avatars

(Philipp Hock, Annika Stampf, Mark Colley, Enrico Rukzio and Martin Baumann)

The [Object, Me, Symbiote, Other] in the Machine: What we can learn about teleoperator-avatar robot relations from video game psychology

(Nicholas David Bowman and Jaime Banks)

A Pilot Study on Preference Estimation Function of Large-Scale Language Model for Hospitality Avatars

(Takahisa Uchida, Yuki Sakamoto, Akimoto Koshino, Midori Ban, Yuichiro Yoshikawa and Hiroshi Ishiguro)

Designing an Inclusive Methodological Approach towards the Evaluation of Sign Language Avatars in a User Study

(Alfarabi Imashev, Nurziya Oralbayeva, Vadim Kimmelman and Anara Sandygulova) - Online presentation