How Remote-Controlled Avatars are Accepted in Hybrid Workplace

Due to Covid-19 outbreak, more people in workforce started working from home. Especially, hybrid work style is widely accepted at workplace as more flexible and inclusive way. However, a challenge of the satellite side of hybrid meeting has also gradually recognized, namely being easily ig-nored by co-located participants. Regarding the issues that hinder the par-ticipation and collaboration of hybrid participants, only a limited study has been made with no clear solutions. Hypnotizing physical embodiment in hybrid work as one of the potential solutions for avoiding satellite par-ticipants being neglected in remote work environment, this work has im-plemented remote-controlled avatars as physical embodiment of a remote participant and investigated its impact on communication and collabora-tion in hybrid meetings. Our preliminary analysis of the field experiments indicated that the Avatar with physical embodiment increased satellite par-ticipant’s social presence, and interestingly, the subjective satisfaction lev-el of the satellite participant was significantly higher than the remote partic-ipation with typical meeting tools, such as Zoom. In this paper, two ob-served effects of avatars with physical embodiment on participating at re-mote work are discussed; firstly, acceptance of satellite participants through embodiment and, second, social presence and potential collabora-tion between AI and Human. Since the hybrid work is expected to increase further in our society, there are a lot of potentials for improvements to de-sign better remote work environment through avatar as physical embodi-ment.