Telelife: The Future of Remote Living

TL;DR

Telelife envisions a future where advanced technologies like digital twins and ultrarealistic interfaces significantly enhance remote living, aiming to better replicate physical interactions and transform daily routines by 2035.

Contribution

The paper introduces the Telelife vision, integrating emerging technologies to improve remote interactions and outlines future research directions in related fields.

Findings

Identifies limitations of current remote interaction technologies.

Proposes a comprehensive vision for 2035 integrating multiple advanced techs.

Provides a survey of relevant research fields and future opportunities.

Abstract

In recent years, everyday activities such as work and socialization have steadily shifted to more remote and virtual settings. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the switch from physical to virtual has been accelerated, which has substantially affected various aspects of our lives, including business, education, commerce, healthcare, and personal life. This rapid and large-scale switch from in-person to remote interactions has revealed that our current technologies lack functionality and are limited in their ability to recreate interpersonal interactions. To help address these limitations in the future, we introduce "Telelife," a vision for the near future that depicts the potential means to improve remote living better aligned with how we interact, live and work in the physical world. Telelife encompasses novel synergies of technologies and concepts such as digital twins, virtual prototyping, and attention and context-aware user interfaces with innovative hardware that can support ultrarealistic graphics, user state detection, and more. These ideas will guide the transformation of our daily lives and routines soon, targeting the year 2035. In addition, we identify opportunities across high-impact applications in domains related to this vision of Telelife. Along with a recent survey of relevant fields such as human-computer interaction, pervasive computing, and virtual reality, the directions outlined in this paper will guide future research on remote living.