View Position Impact on QoE in an Immersive Telepresence System for Remote Operation

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how different viewing positions affect a user's Quality of Experience (QoE) and performance in an immersive telepresence system. A QoE experiment has been conducted with 27 participants to assess the general subjective experience and the performance of remotely operating a toy excavator. Two view positions have been tested, an overhead and a ground-level view, respectively, which encourage reliance on stereoscopic depth cues to different extents for accurate operation. Results demonstrate a significant difference between ground and overhead views: the ground view increased the perceived difficulty of the task, whereas the overhead view increased the perceived accomplishment as well as the objective performance of the task. The perceived helpfulness of the overhead view was also significant according to the participants.

Joint effects of depth-aiding augmentations and viewing positions on the quality of experience in augmented telepresence

“…It was found that HMDs increase the cognitive load of a participant compared to conventional displays, particularly for headsets with narrow Field of View (FoV). In HMD-supported telepresence, as we demonstrated in [12], the choice of viewing position in a telepresence system has a significant impact on operator tasks, when those tasks depend on the operators' position-estimation abilities. This occurs because different viewing positions place different demands on the operators to estimate positions and depths via stereoscopy or other depth cues.…”

“…Once before starting the experiment and once after completing the training session and all test runs, participants also filled out the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire (SSQ), in order to complete the QoE assessment and check that experiment results aren't influenced by significant simulator sickness. In our experiment, the participants were shown a 16-symptom, 5-point SSQ that had been used in [12], with 16 symptoms as defined by Kennedy et al [85]. Of all participants, only 3 participants indicated a "Strong" response in a single symptom each, and no participants indicated any "Severe" response.…”

“…An initial analysis of only the stereoscopy factor from this study was presented in [12]. Beyond that work, this paper covers the full experiment, includes analysis of the AR factor and the joint effect of AR and stereoscopy, discusses the study and related work in greater detail, and provides new results with new analysis of performance-based metrics and participant QoE, both independently and in connection to simulator sickness.…”

Best Viewpoints for External Robots or Sensors Assisting Other Robots

“…Specific viewpoints were heuristically selected by the experimenters and evaluated in a human subject study. Two studies compared multiple possible viewpoints [79,80], the other two studies did not modify the viewpoints during their study [81,82]. The specific viewpoints were selected manually by the experimenters (based on heuristics) and evaluated in terms of subjective difficulty or task performance.…”

“…Dima [82] performed a human subject study to test two fixed heuristically selected viewpoints of a UGV navigating through a scaled-down model of a construction environment. Only two specific viewpoints were evaluated and the viewpoints were fixed regardless of the position or actions of the primary robot.…”