Telepresent walking allows visits to remote places such as museums, exhibitions, architecture, or industrial sites with a high degree of realism. While walking freely around in the user environment, the user sees the remote environment through the "eyes" of a remote mobile teleoperator. For that purpose, the user's motion is tracked and transferred to the teleoperator. Without additional processing of the motion data, the size of the remote environment to be explored is limited to the size of the user environment. This paper proposes an extension of telepresent walking to arbitrarily large remote or virtual spaces based on compressing wide-area motion into the available user space. Motion compression is a novel approach and does not make use of scaling or walking-in-place metaphors. Rather, motion compression introduces some deviation of curvature between user motion and teleoperator motion. An optimization approach is used to nd the user path of minimum curvature deviation with respect to a given predicted teleoperator path that ts inside the boundaries of the user environment. Turning angles and travel distances are mapped with a 1:1 ratio to provide the desired impression of realistic selflocomotion in the teleoperator's environment. The effects of the curvature deviation on inconsistent perception of locomotion are studied in two experiments.
As a novel approach to force-reflecting telepresence, the concept of mobile haptic interfaces (MHI) is presented. An MHI actively follows the locomotion of an operator, who is no longer bound to be stationary during teleoperation. Thus, operator locomotion can be used as an input for locomotion control of a real teleoperator or control of locomotion in a virtual environment while keeping the advantage of force-reflection. The article focuses on basic design issues and presents a prototype MHI for haptic exploration of extended virtual environments.
Telepresent walking creates the sensation of walking through a target environment, which is not directly accessible to a human, e.g. because it is remote, hazardous, or of inappropriate scale. A mobile teleoperator replicates user motion and collects visual and auditory information from the target environment, which is then sent and displayed to the user. While walking freely about the user environment, the user perceives the target environment with the sensors of the teleoperator and feels as if walking through the target environment. Without additional processing of the user's motion data, the size of the target environment to be explored is limited to the size of the user environment. Motion compression extends telepresent walking to arbitrarily large target environments without making use of scaling or walking-in-place metaphors. Both travel distances and turning angles are mapped with ratio 1:1.
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