Feelium: A Touchable Blimp Body for Aerial Telepresence

Floating things invite touch. We present Feelium, a blimp-based telepresence platform that enables visual embodiment and touch interaction through its inflatable skin. Through a VR headset, a remote person inhabits the blimp, looking out of it first-person, appearing on its skin as a face or avatar, and steering it through the room.

Partners in the room pat it, press a palm against it, draw on it, or lean into it; the skin senses each contact and renders it into the wearer's view in VR. Touch thus provides a physical interaction channel for remote presence, turning the skin into a shared surface between remote and co-located partners.

What people in the room do to the body with bare hands, in five families ordered by distance from the body. The first two could happen on a tablet; the last three need a soft, floating body.

First-person recordings from inside the headset while inhabiting the blimp. Faces of people in the room are blurred.