![\"Senior](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/VROOM-Final-Hero-Asset-.png\")
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Editor’s Note: This post was written collaboratively by Brennan Jones, Sunny Zhang, Priscilla Wong, and Sean Rintel and told from the first-person perspective of Brennan Jones.<\/em><\/p>\n One of my life missions is to connect people, and I\u2019ve been pursuing this mission through research projects that bring remote friends, couples, conference attendees, emergency workers, and search and rescue volunteers together. So when I joined the Future of Work<\/a> theme at Microsoft Research Cambridge<\/a> for a summer internship in 2019, I was excited. The theme is led by Abigail Sellen<\/a>, Deputy Director of the lab and a pioneer in video-mediated communication, and I\u2019d be supervised by Senior Researcher Sean Rintel<\/a>, who leads the Socially Intelligent Meetings<\/a> workstream. Of course, the irony wasn\u2019t lost on me that I had to travel to the United Kingdom from my home in Vancouver, Canada, to work on video collaboration. This also meant being over 4,600 miles and an eight-hour time difference away from my girlfriend, Sunny Zhang<\/a>, a Microsoft Software Development Engineer in Vancouver.<\/p>\n We stayed in touch through daily video chats and messaging and even took advantage of a more advanced way of connecting: telepresence robots. Effectively video chat on wheels, a telepresence robot allows a remote individual to drive around another place and see what\u2019s going on from the robot\u2019s camera while people in the space can see the remote individual on the robot\u2019s screen. The Cambridge lab had a Suitable Technologies Beam robot, so late one afternoon, during the first week of my internship, Sunny \u201cbeamed in\u201d for a tour. Rather than me carrying Sunny around on my phone or laptop, she \u201cwalked\u201d with<\/em> me; the robot gave her physical and mobile autonomy. She even made a special friend\u2014a mini Wall-E robot sitting on my colleague Martin Grayson\u2019s desk. Martin made Wall-E dance, and in response, Sunny rotated her robot body to dance, cementing their robot friendship.<\/p>\n Researcher Brennan Jones and his girlfriend, Microsoft Software Development Engineer Sunny Zhang, used a Suitable Technologies Beam robot to stay connected when Brennan took an internship at Microsoft Research Cambridge, putting over 4,600 miles of distance between the couple. While \u201cvisiting\u201d the lab, Sunny made friends with colleague Martin Grayson\u2019s Wall-E robot (far left).<\/p><\/div>\n We took a selfie as a memento of our time there together. But Sunny was still trapped and flattened on the robot\u2019s monitor, much like video chat on a laptop or phone. And from her perspective, I was trapped and flattened on her screen. There was a wall between us. I wanted it to feel more like she was there with me and also wanted her<\/em> to feel more like she was present.<\/p>\n This desire to connect in meaningful ways, both in our personal and professional lives, is in our nature and is the motivation behind Virtual Robotic Overlay for Online Meetings<\/a>, or VROOM, for short, an ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020)<\/a> Late-Breaking Work. VROOM is a two-way telepresence system that has two aims. The first is to help a remote individual feel like a remote physical place belongs as much to them as the local people in it. The second is to help local people feel that a remote individual is with them in the same physical space\u2014be they colleagues, friends, or partners. VROOM is our story of making being there remotely <\/em>a reality.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/05\/VROOM-Image-1v2-1024x448.jpg\")