A quality of experience evaluation system and research challenges for networked virtual reality-based teleoperation applications

Teleoperation applications are designed to assist humans in operating complex mechanical systems. Interfaces to teleoperation systems have always been challenging. Recently the potential of virtual reality (VR) has been a topic of interest, particularly with the availability of head mounted displays and interaction controller devices. As a result, research into the viability of VR as a technology to support remote operation and improved human machine interaction has emerged. It is assumed that VR will offer the user a more immersive and natural experience when operating a virtual representation of a mechanical system. To achieve this, there are a number of research challenges that need to be addressed. In this short paper, we introduce and discuss key challenges for VR-based teleoperation systems. Since the key focus of our work is understand user quality of experience (QoE) of VR-based teleoperation applications, the design and implementation of an implicit and explicit QoE Evaluation system is also presented.