Towards a Māori Telepresence System
Jung-Woo Noel Park, Steven J. Mills, Hēmi Whaanga, Paora Mato, Robert W. Lindeman, Holger T. Regenbrecht · 2019
The A̅tea project is investigating how technology can be used to help Ma̅ori share and preserve knowledge, culture, and language. One aspect of this is the use of telepresence systems to connect members of an iwi (tribe) or ru̅nanga (council) with their marae (meeting place, communal centre) and community. We describe the range of interactions we can support through voxel-based telepresence, and give examples of their application in the context of the A̅tea project. We also discuss the issues around presence, as a defining element of virtual environments, that are important to this project, particularly the distinction between copresence and social presence. We show that it is possible to distinguish between these two using existing evaluation methods.