Designing Embodied Telepresence for Remote Collaboration: A Comparative Study of Robots and Avatars

Telepresence systems enable remote collaboration through physical robots or virtual avatars, yet prior comparisons have focused on technical capabilities and affordances from remote users. This overlooks how local collaborators interpret and respond to embodied actions. To investigate these differences under comparable conditions, we developed a telepresence system that supports functionally equivalent collaboration through either a robotic or avatar embodiment and conducted a within-subjects study in which participants collaborated with a remote partner embodied across various tasks. Both embodiments supported functionally equivalent actions: navigation, gesture, object referencing, and digital tool use. Despite this parity of system functions and tasks, participants consistently interpreted and organized collaboration differently: robots invited spatially grounded coordination and were framed as assistants requiring accommodation, while avatars invited engaged discussion and were framed as active collaborators capable of reciprocal interaction. We discuss design implications for aligning embodiment choices with the relational and task-specific demands of remote collaboration.