Design and Field Study of Syn-Leap: A Symmetric Telepresence System for Immersion Switching and Walking Across Multiple Locations
Takeru Yazaki, Yuna Watanabe, L. S. Kong, Masahiko İnami · 2023
Outdoor activities, such as traveling and sightseeing, become challenging to realize when individuals are geographically distant. This paper introduces Syn-Leap, a symmetrical wearable telepresence system designed to allow multiple users to explore outdoor settings while mutually sharing their environments. With Syn-Leap, users wear a 360° camera and AR glasses, allowing them to share their environment through video streaming while simultaneously viewing the videos of other users while walking outdoors. To investigate the experiences and communication generated by this system, we conducted a field study in Kyoto, Japan, focusing on tourism scenarios. The results revealed that participants could achieve a sense of walking together by seamlessly switching between exploring their own environment and viewing the video feeds of other users, occasionally overlaying the AR content from other users onto their own environment.