Family
presence.
Make a distant family member feel more naturally included in a shared room.
The opportunity
Design for the moment that matters.
What breaks today
Phone calls require people to hold and pass a device, while television calls pull every participant’s attention toward a flat wall. The remote family member becomes content rather than company.
The presence pattern
A dedicated portrait Space places the remote person at a comfortable scale and eye line, allowing the local room to continue a meal, celebration or conversation naturally.
Design requirements
Make it useful before making it magical.
- 01
Obtain real consent
Make capture, participation, recording and synthetic transformation choices understandable and reversible.
- 02
Protect emotional context
Do not use surprise, false liveness or manipulative simulation in intimate or vulnerable moments.
- 03
Keep people in control
Use simple entry, exit, mute, delete and human-support paths appropriate to the audience.
Operator runbook
Design the complete service—not only the scene.
- 01
Frame the service
Families, care communities and connection services should document the intended audience, room, session length, approved content or knowledge, human escalation path and the current baseline for completed visits.
- 02
Invite with clarity
Before the family presence experience begins, explain why the presence is there, whether it is live, recorded or AI-assisted, what it can do and how a participant can leave or reach a person.
- 03
Operate the moment
A dedicated portrait Space places the remote person at a comfortable scale and eye line, allowing the local room to continue a meal, celebration or conversation naturally. The operator should be able to observe state, recover the session and protect the physical activity already happening in the room.
- 04
Close the loop
End with a visible next step, capture only consented information and record completed visits, conversation duration, connection satisfaction. Review failures and handoffs before repeating or expanding the experience.
Pilot scorecard
Prove a real outcome in the room.
Completed visits
Define the starting event, completion event and current-workflow baseline for completed visits. Count only observable outcomes.
Conversation duration
Review conversation duration by audience, session stage and operator. Use the pattern to find where confidence is gained or lost.
Connection satisfaction
Set a minimum threshold for connection satisfaction before launch. Name the owner and recovery action when a session misses it.
Decision gates
Know when presence is—and is not—the answer.
Presence must earn the room
If the same family presence outcome can be achieved by a well-designed phone, kiosk or conventional video call with equal trust and clarity, use the simpler tool.
The boundary must stay visible
Do not launch family presence until participants can identify the role, source, live or synthetic state, information boundary and human fallback without guessing.
The operation must survive novelty
Families, care communities and connection services should be able to run, pause, recover and measure the experience repeatedly. Do not scale while success depends on a founder or engineer standing beside it.
Evidence status. This page is a product-design field brief, not a claim that Reality Relay has already produced the stated customer outcome. Replace the hypothesis with measured pilot evidence before presenting it as proof.
Build the first pilot
Start narrow enough to learn.
For Family presence, begin with one real environment, one defined audience and one repeatable interaction. Establish who operates the experience, what information or tools it can access and exactly when a person must take control.
Reality Relay Platform coordinates content, session state, approved intelligence and operations. Reality Relay Spaces give the experience a calibrated physical endpoint with intentional scale, eye line, sound and grounding. The pilot should earn expansion by improving the scorecard above—not by novelty alone.
- Primary audience
- Families, care communities and connection services
- Experience family
- Personal presence & community
- First decision
- Choose the room, baseline and accountable operator
- Expansion rule
- Scale only after the scorecard beats the current workflow