Human-robots interaction environment to enhance the sense of presence in remote sport watching

Abstract

The recent Covid-19 outbreak has contributed to raising the popularity of online video communication and meeting platforms, as an alternative to face-to-face interactions. Such trend has also triggered the emergence of remote cheering systems, hinting at the possibility that in the near future, people could enjoy watching sports games in virtual environments even from their home. However, reproducing a sense of presence that is similar to the atmosphere felt by fans in stadiums or event venues is a major challenge within virtual environments. In order to mitigate such issue, our idea is to embed in virtual environments groups of cheerful robots thereby creating a sense of unity and mimicking emotion spread within fans. In this study, we built a virtual cheering environment and embedded a game-events driven behavior model that enables group of robots to display various emotions through non-verbal reactions accordingly to the game flow. Then, we conducted a preliminary evaluation of the proposed system in which participants and a group of robots were placed in a virtual cheering environment watching a baseball game. Obtained results hinted at the meaningfulness of the proposed approach. Nevertheless, further work would be necessary to achieve a sufficient sense of presence and validate the effectiveness of our proposed environment.