Destabilizing effects of visual environment motions simulating eye movements or head movements

Teleoperators are the humans who control devices from a "distance." This distance might be extreme physical separation, as in remote assembly of Space Station Freedom by ground-based personnel. But the distance could be effective distance of scale, for the manipulation of microscopic structures like single living cells or the components within an integrated circuit chip, or even the conceptual distance of safety, where the devices effect their actions inside a nuclear reactor's core or in the ocean' s depths. Virtual environments refer to the synthesized realities that can be generated by various types of computerized displays, not only visual displays but also acoustic, tactile, and forcereflective displays. Video games are common but usually limited examples of virtual words. An implicit theme is telepresence, a term whose definition is imprecise. It involves the use of virtual environments to improve the efficiency of teleoperators by giving them a compelling sense of "being where the action is." Telepresence operations seem more natural and facile, and thus more easily trained, than other possible models for the human-computer interface. Consider a complex assembly task, controlled by wearing a sensor garment that enslaves a robotic arm to mimic the user's own arm movements, and visualized on video and felt by tactile and force-reflective feedbacks; versus, its control by typing code into a keyboard with feedback via numerical tables. Telepresence seems to endow the user with such a robust mental model that he or she becomes absorbed into the synthetic reality as though absorixd_ into a vivid dream.