Human-robot interaction environment to enhance the sense of presence in remote sports watching

The recent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has helped increase the popularity of online video communication and meeting platforms as alternatives to face-to-face interactions. Such a trend has also triggered the emergence of remote cheering systems, hinting at the possibility that people could enjoy watching sports games in virtual environments even from their homes in the near future. However, reproducing a sense of presence similar to the atmosphere felt by fans in stadiums or event venues is a major challenge within virtual environments. Thus, our idea is to embed groups of cheerful robots in virtual environments, thereby creating a sense of unity and mimicking emotion spread among fans. In this study, we built a virtual cheering environment and embedded a game-event driven behavior model that enables a group of robots to display various emotions through nonverbal reactions according to the game flow. Then, we conducted a preliminary evaluation of the proposed system, where the participants and a group of robots were placed in a virtual cheering environment to watch a baseball game. The obtained results hinted at the meaningfulness of the proposed approach. Nevertheless, further work is necessary to achieve a sufficient sense of presence and validate the effectiveness of our proposed environment.