Positioning accuracy of a virtual stereographic pointer in a real stereoscopic video world

Typical teleoperator display systems to date have relied on standard monoscopic video as the primary feedback link. Research clearly shows that using stereoscopic video (SV) is generally a significant improvement over monoscopic video (MV) for most teleoperation tasks. Abundant as the benefits of SV are, they can be dramatically increased with the superpositioning of stereoscopic graphics (SG) on the SV image. The resulting SV + SG system can greatly enhance the benefits of SV alone in the understanding of a remote world. This combination of media results in an exploration tool uniquely suited for examining different environments, whether remote, microscopic, or artificial. The SV + SG technology can also be used as a command tool that can be used to control manipulators (remote, microscopic, or artificial) in the different environment. A SV + SG system was implemented, and an experiment was performed to determine whether or not SG images were actually perceived as existing at the desired location in the SV view. The experiment compared the performance of a virtual SV + SG Pointer with that of a real-world pointer, and showed that the virtual pointer could be positioned as accurately as the real pointer, with only a slightly higher variance.