Symbiotic Society with Avatars (SSA): Toward Empowering Social Interactions Beyond Space and Time

Avatar robots, representations of remote people, help them extend their physical, cognitive, and perceptual capabilities. These avatars can be a range of embodiments from virtual agents to physical robots. With avatar robots, a person (operator) can coexist in multiple locations (beyond space) by controlling multiple avatars simultaneously and move from one place to another without delays (beyond time) by connecting to another avatar in a different location. In the near future, avatar technology would change people's lives dramatically. However, we face various challenges to reach this future, including uncharted knowledge of social interactions between people and avatar robots, missing standardization on developing robots (robot specs and controls), the lack of related laws and ethical rules, and technical difficulties. With this developing area of human-robot interaction, new key challenges and problems, approaches, and data are rapidly emerging. This workshop would act as a key meeting point to focus this effort and discuss avatar robots and related research and form new collaborations to forge ahead toward symbiotic society with avatars.