MetaPo: A Robotic Meta Portal for Interspace Communication Takuro Yonezawa Nozomi Hayashida takuro@nagoya-u.jp linda@ucl.nuee.nagoya-u.ac.jp Nagoya University Nagoya, Japan Johannes Przybilla Yutaro Kyono prjoh.dev@gmail.com kyono@kyopalab.com Kyopalab LCC Tokyo, Japan Kenta Urano Nobuo Kawaguchi vrano@ucl.nuee.nagoya-u.ac.jp kawaguti@nagoya-u.jp Nagoya University Nagoya, Japan A. MetaPo in physical space D. MetaPo in cyber space B.360°media call between different spaces C. Immersive group telepresence Figure 1: Interspace communication with MetaPo, unifying communication among diferent spaces with 360 ◦ telecommuni- cation and immersive group telepresence. ABSTRACT We introduce MetaPo, a mobile robot with spheric display, 360 ◦ media I/O and robotic hands for creating a unifed model of inter- space communication. MetaPo works as a portal between pairs of physical-physical, cyber-cyber and cyber-physical spaces to pro- vide 1) panoramic communication for multiple remote users, and 2) immersive interspace migration with mobility functionality. The paper overviews our concept and frst prototype of MetaPo with its hardware and software implementation. CCS CONCEPTS · Human-centered computing → Virtual reality; Collabora- tive and social computing. KEYWORDS virtual reality, cyber-physical system, interspace communication ACM Reference Format: Takuro Yonezawa, Nozomi Hayashida, Johannes Przybilla, Yutaro Kyono, Kenta Urano, and Nobuo Kawaguchi. 2022. MetaPo: A Robotic Meta Portal for Interspace Communication. In Special Interest Group on Computer Graph- ics and Interactive Techniques Conference Posters (SIGGRAPH ’22 Posters), August 07-11, 2022. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2 pages. https://doi.org/10. 1145/3532719.3543255 Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). SIGGRAPH ’22 Posters, August 07-11, 2022, Vancouver, BC, Canada © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9361-4/22/08. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532719.3543255 1 INTRODUCTION Information technology extends our living space to cyber space, i.e., virtual reality or the so-called metaverse. In addition, as the digital counterpart of a physical space, the concept of digital twins[Saracco 2019] attracts many researchers in both academia and industry in the smart city context. Thus, methods to connect or integrate such various spaces are getting more important for enhancing communication and services among these spaces. Many methods have been proposed to bridge physical and cyber worlds, however, there still remains an unsolved key challenge - "what is the unifed way to connect distributed physical and cyber spaces?". We introduce a new concept called MetaPo, a robotic meta portal for interspace linking between physical and cyber spaces. MetaPo can be placed at both physical and cyber spaces (A. and D. in Fig.1), and provide a unifed user experience to the users in both spaces by leveraging its 360 ◦ I/O, spherical vision and robotic functions. MetaPo provides two levels of linking spaces, called 1) Mixed Link where the users remain in each respective spaces (B. in Fig.1), and 2) Immersive Link where remote users virtually migrate into a local MetaPo instance (C. in Fig.1). With these functions and services, MetaPo works as a portal to connect distributed physical and cyber spaces. Moreover, it envisions the future social network where physical and cyber boundaries are fading seamlessly. 2 METAPO 2.1 Design MetaPo is designed to work as a portal that connects distributed physical and cyber spaces. Fig.2 shows the concept design of MetaPo. MetaPo is a four-wheeled robot which equips several I/O compo- nents such as 360 ◦ camera and microphone, directional speakers,