Dear Colleagues,

Telepresence means communicating presence. The bandwidth of this communication has been expanding in two ways. One is an increasing variety of modalities: Voice, video, touch, embodiment, and so on. The other is an increasing quality of each modality: Life-size video, binaural audio, haptic devices, humanoid robots, and so on. There remains a vast number of unexploited ways to combine these modalities. For example, there is a huge gap between the designs of LCD TVs and teleoperated robots. Commercial telepresence robots are an intermediate design, and there are many other possible intermediate designs. Repeating design and development of those designs is essential to advance telepresence technologies.

Teleconferencing for business meetings is not only an application of telepresence technologies, there are a lot of specific applications that require specialized telepresence systems: Healthcare, education, entertainment, crisis management, retailing, dining, dating, exercise, socializing, childcare, pet care, and so on. The same videoconferencing system or teleoperated robot cannot be suitable to all of those applications. Therefore, telepresence systems have to evolve and adapt to each application. However, the evolution and specialization of telepresence systems seem to be moderate. To accelerate this evolution, both empirical evaluations and in-the-wild trials are necessary.

This Special Issue aims at collecting original studies on advanced telepresence technologies, innovative designs that combine various modalities, experiments that deploy prototype systems, and the exploration of new telepresence applications. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• Extended or improved videoconferencing systems
• Teleoperated or semi-autonomous robots for remote social interaction
• Combination of video-based and robot-based teleconferencing
• Specialized telepresence systems for specific applications
• Deployment and evaluation of commercial telepresence systems
• Studies on human–(human, agent, robot, and animal) interactions for telepresence
• VR, AR, and MR technologies for telepresence
• Sociological and psychological studies for telepresence

Dr. Hideyuki Nakanishi
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Future Internet is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• Telepresence
• Videoconference
• Visual communication
• Social presence
• Social interaction
• Multi-modality
• Nonverbal communication
• Embodied agents
• Humanoid robots
• Virtual reality