The vision of a "3D Web" as a combination of massive online virtual environments and today's WWW currently attracts a lot of attention. While it provides a multitude of opportunities, the realization of this vision on a global scale poses severe technical challenges. This work-in-progress paper intends to point out some of the major challenges and highlights key concepts of an infrastructure that is being developed in order to meet them. Among these concepts, special emphasis is put on the usage of a two-tier Peer-to-Peer approach, the implementation of Torrent-based data distribution and the development of a graded consistency notion. The paper also briefly presents the current state of a prototype implementation that is being developed in order to validate these concepts and evaluate alternative approaches.

Hybrid societies are self-organizing, collective systems, which are composed of different components, for example, natural and artificial parts (bio-hybrid) or human beings interacting with and through technical systems (socio-technical). Many different disciplines investigate methods and systems closely related to the design of hybrid societies. A stronger collaboration between these disciplines could allow for re-use of methods and create significant synergies. We identify three main areas of challenges in the design of self-organizing hybrid societies. First, we identify the formalization challenge. There is an urgent need for a generic model that allows a description and comparison of collective hybrid societies. Second, we identify the system design challenge. Starting from the formal specification of the system, we need to develop an integrated design process. Third, we identify the challenge of interdisciplinarity. Current research on self-organizing hybrid societies stretches over many different fields and hence requires the re-use and synthesis of methods at intersections between disciplines. We then conclude by presenting our perspective for future approaches with high potential in this area.

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Social robots have an enormous potential for educational applications and allow for cognitive outcomes that are similar to those with human involvement. Remotely controlling a social robot to interact with students and peers in an immersive fashion opens up new possibilities for instructors and learners alike. Using immersive approaches can promote engagement and have beneficial effects on remote lesson delivery and participation. However, the performance and power consumption associated with the involved devices are often not sufficiently contemplated, despite being particularly important in light of sustainability considerations. The contributions of this research are thus twofold. On the one hand, we present telepresence solutions for a social robot’s location-independent operation using (a) a virtual reality headset with controllers and (b) a mobile augmented reality application. On the other hand, we perform a thorough analysis of their power consumption and system performance, discussing the impact of employing the various technologies. Using the QTrobot as a platform, direct and immersive control via different interaction modes, including motion, emotion, and voice output, is possible. By not focusing on individual subsystems or motor chains, but the cumulative energy consumption of an unaltered robot performing remote tasks, this research provides orientation regarding the actual cost of deploying immersive robotic telepresence solutions.

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