HYPERPRESENCE-an application environment for control of multi-user agents in mixed reality spaces

The HYPERPRESENCE system proposed in this work is a mix between hardware and software platforms developed for control of multi-user agents in a mixed reality environment. The hardware is basically composed of robot systems that manipulate objects and move in a closed, real environment and a video camera, imaging system. The environment can be any place that provides or needs interactions with virtual environments for showing results or else to allow manipulation in it via a virtual reality interface. The software part is composed of three main systems: an acquisition module for position control, a tower (hardware) communication module for manipulating the robots and a multi user VRML server for managing virtual spaces and to provide synchronism between the real places and the virtual ones. We present the design and implementation solution adopted for the HYPERPRESENCE architecture. We analyze problems with communication protocols, precision of positioning, how to relate physical and virtual objects and show our solutions for these problems.