Telepresence Over Mobile Phones

Abstract

Telepresence is a use of virtual reality technology, especially for remote control of machinery or for apparent participation in distant events. And telepresence systems are used to establish a sense of presence or shared space among geographically separated members of a group. Due to the popularity of telepresence, a huge amount of research has been devoted towards the development of novel telepresence frameworks. Most of these systems are standalone non portable systems where supports only for communications and do not consider on supporting multiuser collaborative works with telepresence. We present a telepresence framework for mobile phones with multiuser participation of collaborative work and we have implemented robots based structure to represent the distant event which all the participants work together to accomplish a single goal. Before the wider acceptance of telepresence the famous technique for participate with distant operation was teleoperation. The teleoperation is the process of human operator controls a robot from a distance. The connotation of teleoperation is that the distance is too greater for the operator to see what the robot is doing. In most cases, the human operator sits at a workstation and directs a robot through some sort of interface. After introducing of virtual reality technologies the teleoperation was drastically changed to telepresence which is a greater approach for projection of the human sensory apparatus into a remote location. Later developments of telepresence frameworks much focused on reducing cognitive fatigues exist with most of the virtual reality approaches and making the interface more natural. Some of the identi ed cognitive fatigues are attention wanders, experience headache and other physical symptoms of stress due to limited eld of view and jerky images. The simulator sickness is also an important factor to consider which cause due to discordance between the visual system saying operator is moving and inner sensors saying the operator is stationary. We came up with a mobile telepresence framework which improves ordinary telepresence frameworks to use in mobile phones and facilitates participants to collaborate in a distant operation. The factors what we have focused on for improving with our framework are portability of telepresence, enhancing the accuracy of users decision making with multidirectional vision and using of multi-modal interfaces available on mobile phones to update the user with di erent sensory feedback information. The implementation of the framework was distributed into three di erent platforms as Mobile platform, Desktop and Robot hardware/embedded platform.