VR Enhanced Teleoperation

A higher sense of presence and interaction capability may be provided to a user when adopting 3D stereoscopic visualization compared to 2D viewing. Depth perception and task performance may however greatly vary for different display technologies, while available budget and application context constraint system design and approach selection. This work intends to contribute in assessing benefits of stereoscopic viewing for different virtual reality (VR) technologies. The investigation is performed under different conditions and it uses both synthetic and real images. The investigation concentrates on few aspects: comparative evaluation of VR facilities, the influence of selective visual attention on robot tele-drive, performance in collision avoidance and distance estimation. Results from a set of test trials run on 3 different VR facilities in 5 different configurations, emphasize some tendencies and represent a base for further investigations.