Recent advances in humanoid robot technologies have made it possible to inhabit a humanlike form located at a remote place. This allows the participant to interact with others in that space and experience the illusion that the participant is actually present in the remote space. Moreover, with these humanlike forms, it may be possible to induce a full-body ownership illusion, where the robot body is perceived to be one's own. We show that it is possible to induce the full-body ownership illusion over a remote robotic body with a highly robotic appearance. Additionally, our results indicate that even with nonmanual control of a remote robotic body, it is possible to induce feelings of agency and illusions of body ownership. Two established control methods, an SSVEP-based BCI and eye tracking, were tested as a means of controlling the robot's gesturing. Our experience and the results indicate that both methods are tractable for immersive control of a humanoid robot in a social telepresence setting.

An experiment was carried out to examine the extent to which an avatar can be perceived by people as similar to themselves, including their face and body. The avatar was judged by the participants themselves rather than by third parties. The experiment was organized in two phases. The initial phase consisted of a forced-choice, paired comparison method used to create a ranking of 10 virtual faces in order of preference. This set of faces included a facial mesh, created by a custom software pipeline to rapidly generate avatars that resembled the experimental participants. Six more faces, derived from the participants' own face, were also shown in order to gain insight into the acceptance of a variety of facial similarities. In the second phase, full-body avatars with the most and least preferred faces were presented along with the direct pipeline output. Participants rated their level of satisfaction with those avatars as virtual self-representations and provided the level of perceived resemblance to themselves. The results show that our avatars are perceived to be similar to the self, rated at 7.5/10. Those avatars with faces derived from the participants' face mixed with an ethnically similar face were also rated with high scores. These results differ significantly from how arbitrary avatars are perceived. Therefore, reasonably physically similar avatars can also be expected to be perceived as similar by participants.