A 360 ◦ Video-based Robot Platform for Telepresent Redirected Walking

Telepresence systems have the potential to overcome limits and distance constraints of the real-world by enabling people to remotely visit and interact with each other. However, current telepresence systems usually lack natural ways of supporting interaction and exploration of remote environments (REs). In particular, the usage of single webcams for capturing the RE provides only a limited illusion of spatial presence. Furthermore, typical movement controls of mobile platforms in today’s telepresence systems are often restricted to simple interaction devices. For these reasons, we introduce a prototype of a 360◦ video-based telepresence system consisting of a head-mounted display (HMD), a 360◦ camera, and a mobile robot platform. Considering the heterogeneous layouts between the user’s local environment (LE) in which the user’s motions are tracked and the RE, redirected walking (RDW) technology and different gains are applied to this system to allow users to explore a much larger RE than the LE. With this setup, users can get a 360◦ full-view rendered view on the HMD from the RE, and explore it by the most intuitive and natural way, e. g., by real walking in the user’s LE, and thus controlling movements of the robot platform in the RE.