We propose a new approach to Physical Telepresence, based
on shared workspaces with the ability to capture and remotely
render the shapes of people and objects. In this paper, we describe
the concept of shape transmission, and propose interaction
techniques to manipulate remote physical objects and
physical renderings of shared digital content. We investigate
how the representation of user’s body parts can be altered to
amplify their capabilities for teleoperation. We also describe
the details of building and testing prototype Physical Telepresence
workspaces based on shape displays. A preliminary
evaluation shows how users are able to manipulate remote objects,
and we report on our observations of several different
manipulation techniques that highlight the expressive nature
of our system.