Real time visualization of robot state with mobile virtual reality

With the deployment of large, distributed networks of cameras and other sensors, it is becoming necessary to also address the issue of how to effectively present the large volume of gathered information to a user. The paper presents a virtual/augmented reality architecture that has been explicitly designed for use with a fully-portable, wearable computing system. A critical component of this system is a network-based mechanism for the representation of virtual objects and the live communication of changes in their state to users located elsewhere on the network. By presenting virtual objects in a uniform manner over the network, it becomes easy to construct new dynamic, virtual environments that reflect the state of robots or humans within the real environment. We demonstrate the utility of the architecture through several robot and human tracking examples.