The Geminoid Reality

Our society is on the borderline of information era, experiencing a transition towards a robotic one. Humanoid and android robots are entering with a steady pace into our everyday lives taking up roles related to companionship, partnership, wellness, healthcare, and education among others. The fusion of information technology, ubiquitous computing, robotics, and android science has generated the Geminoid Reality. The Geminoid is a teleoperated, connected to a computer network, android robot that works as a duplicate of an existing person. A motion-capture system tracks facial expressions, and head movements of the operator, and transmits them to the robot, overriding at run-time the preprogrammed configurations of the robots actuators. The Geminoid Reality is combining the Visual Reality (users’ and robot’s point of view) with an Augmented one (operator’s point of view) into a new kind of mixed reality involving physical embodiment, and representation, causing the ownership transfer, and blended presence phenomena.