Telepresence

Telepresence is the use of technology to give a person the sensation of being present at a location other than their actual physical location, and to perceive and sometimes act in that remote place through cameras, microphones, displays, and other transducers. The term covers a range of systems, from video conferencing rooms and remote-controlled robots to immersive virtual reality and augmented reality meeting spaces in which people are represented by avatars. The cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky popularized the word in a 1980 essay, and it has since become a central concept in the study of presence, the subjective feeling of "being there".

In remote-operation contexts, telepresence describes the experience of a real but distant environment, as opposed to virtual presence, the feeling of being inside a purely computer-generated world. Many modern systems blur this line by combining live capture of a remote place with VR or AR displays. The closely related Japanese concept of telexistence, defined by Susumu Tachi around the same time as Minsky's essay, extends the idea to both real and virtual environments and to control of avatar robots.

Etymology and origin

The word "telepresence" combines the Greek prefix "tele" (far) with "presence". It was put into wide circulation by Marvin Minsky, a co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in an essay published in the June 1980 issue of Omni magazine. Minsky did not claim to have invented the term himself. He wrote that scientists often used the words "teleoperators" or "telefactors" for remote-control tools, and added: "I prefer to call this 'telepresence', a name suggested by my futurist friend Patrick Gunkel."

Minsky's essay described wearing a sensor-lined garment whose every motion would be reproduced by remote mechanical hands equipped with their own sensors, so that an operator could see and feel what was happening at a distant site. He argued that "telepresence emphasizes the importance of high quality sensory feedback" and that the goal was instruments that "will feel and work so much like our own hands that we won't notice any significant difference". The essay sketched a "remote controlled economy" reachable within about twenty years for roughly one billion dollars in investment, with applications in nuclear-reactor cleanup (he cited the Three Mile Island accident), brain surgery, deep-sea mining, and the construction of lunar factories and solar-power satellites.

Minsky traced the underlying idea to science fiction, crediting Robert A. Heinlein's 1942 short story "Waldo", which described a master-slave remote manipulator system. The word "waldo" later became a generic engineering term for such a device.

Telepresence, presence, and virtual presence

Telepresence is one of the foundations of presence research in VR. Two papers from 1992 set out the distinctions that are still used.

Thomas B. Sheridan, in "Musings on Telepresence and Virtual Presence" (Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, volume 1, pages 120 to 126), used "presence" for the general sense of being in an artificial or remote environment, and reserved "telepresence" for cases involving teleoperation of a real, physically remote environment, distinguishing it from "virtual presence" in a computer-generated one.

Jonathan Steuer, in "Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence" (Journal of Communication, volume 42, issue 4, pages 73 to 93), defined virtual reality through experience rather than hardware, treating telepresence as the experience of presence in an environment by means of a communication medium. Steuer argued that media can be ranked on two dimensions: vividness, the capacity of a technology to produce a sensorially rich mediated environment, and interactivity, the degree to which a user can influence the form or content of that environment. The more vivid and the more interactive a system, he held, the stronger the sense of telepresence it evokes; VR scores highly on both. Because telepresence depends on substituting transducers for the senses, it shares most of its user-facing hardware (displays, trackers, gloves, head-mounted displays) with VR, which is why the technologies developed together.

Telexistence

Independently of Minsky, the Japanese engineer Susumu Tachi conceived a closely related concept he named telexistence, which he dates to 19 September 1980. He first published it in Japanese in 1982 at the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers conference and in English in 1984 at the RoManSy conference. Tachi defines telexistence as "a concept that denotes an extension of human existence, wherein a person exists wholly in a location, other than his or her actual current location, and can perform tasks freely there". It became the guiding principle of Japan's eight-year national project on "Advanced Robot Technology in Hazardous Environments", which ran from 1983.

Tachi distinguishes telexistence from telepresence on two points: telexistence aims to make a user feel that they truly inhabit the remote space rather than merely observe it, and it covers both real and virtual environments, whereas telepresence is normally limited to teleoperation of a real one. His TELESAR series of anthropomorphic avatar robots demonstrates the idea: TELESAR V (2011) transmitted force, vibration, and temperature back to the operator, and the 67 degree-of-freedom TELESAR VI followed in 2020.

Categories of telepresence systems

Video and immersive conferencing

The most widespread form of telepresence is video conferencing, in which cameras, microphones, and screens convey people in a remote room. From the mid-2000s, vendors marketed high-end "immersive telepresence" suites that used life-size displays, matched furniture and lighting, and spatial audio to create the impression of sitting around a single shared table. Cisco's TelePresence systems were a prominent example. Cisco later folded that line into its Webex video range and moved away from the fixed studio model toward the Webex Room Panorama; several of the older immersive room products reached end of sale by 2022 and 2023.

Telepresence robots

A telepresence robot is a remote-controlled mobile device, usually a screen, camera, microphone, and speaker on a wheeled base, that lets an operator move through and converse in a distant place. They are used for remote work, telehealth, and education. Notable products have included Double Robotics' Double (an iPad on a self-balancing base), the Beam from Suitable Technologies, and OhmniLabs' Ohmni. The market remains modest: one industry estimate put the global telepresence-robot market at about 0.13 billion US dollars in 2024.

The product landscape has shifted recently. Blue Ocean Robotics acquired the assets and rights to the Beam robot from Suitable Technologies in August 2019. OhmniLabs discontinued its general-purpose Ohmni robot in August 2024 in favor of a healthcare-focused OhmniCare model, was acquired by the warehouse-automation firm Symbotic in December 2024, and introduced a 4K "Supercam" upgrade in March 2025.

VR and AR telepresence

With consumer head-mounted displays, telepresence increasingly means meeting inside a shared three-dimensional space rather than looking at a flat video feed. In social VR and remote-collaboration apps, each person is represented by an avatar whose head and hand movements (and, on devices with hand tracking, finger movements) are streamed in real time, so gestures, gaze direction, and spatial position act as social cues. This is the basis of the wider Social VR category and of work platforms such as Meta's Horizon Workrooms, which adds desk and keyboard tracking and spatial audio. Researchers treat the resulting feeling of sharing a space with others as a distinct quality, often called co-presence or social presence, alongside the spatial presence of feeling located in the environment.

AR telepresence overlays a remote person or their guidance onto the local user's view of the real world. Microsoft Research's Holoportation, demonstrated in 2016, used rigs of depth cameras to capture a high-quality three-dimensional model of a person, then transmitted and reconstructed it so that a viewer wearing a HoloLens mixed reality headset saw the remote participant as a life-size hologram in their own room. Holoportation was later incorporated into Microsoft Mesh, the company's mixed-reality collaboration platform. Microsoft retired the standalone Mesh apps and the Immersive Space view on 1 December 2025, moving a reduced 3D-meeting feature into Microsoft Teams; this followed the company winding down its HoloLens hardware program.

Applications

Telepresence is used wherever a person needs to perceive or act in a place they cannot safely or practically reach. Minsky's original targets, hazardous environments such as damaged nuclear plants, the deep sea, and space, remain core uses; teleoperated systems work in bomb disposal, undersea inspection, and remote planetary operation. In medicine, telepresence robots support remote consultation and patient monitoring, and teleoperation underlies remote and robot-assisted surgery, in which a surgeon's hand motions drive instruments at a distance, sometimes with haptics feedback. Education and remote work use both wheeled robots and VR meeting spaces so that a person can attend class, tour a facility, or collaborate from elsewhere. In consumer VR, the same techniques power social and collaborative experiences across the broader metaverse.

Relationship to virtual and augmented reality

Telepresence and VR are distinct ideas that use overlapping technology. Telepresence is usually about a real, physically existing remote place, while VR generates a synthetic environment; AR sits between them by adding remote people or information to the user's real surroundings. Both depend on convincing the senses through high-fidelity capture and display and on giving the user a sense of immersion and presence. Improvements that raise presence in VR, such as higher-resolution displays, low-latency tracking, spatial audio, and haptics, also tend to improve telepresence, and many recent systems are explicitly hybrid: a live three-dimensional capture of a remote location is viewed through a VR or AR headset, so a single experience can contain both real and virtual presence.

See also

• Presence
• Social VR
• Avatar
• Omnipresence
• Spatial computing