Extended Abstract: Natural Human-Robot Interaction in Virtual Reality Telepresence Systems

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, single we-bcams for capturing the RE provide only a limited illusion of spatial presence and movement control of mobile platforms in today's telepresence systems are often restricted to simple interaction devices. One of the main challenges of telepresence systems is to allow users to explore a RE in an immersive, intuitive and natural way, e. g. real walking in the user's local environment (LE), and thus controlling motions of the robot platform in the RE. The goal of the presented research project is to meet these challenges, and contribute to the development and evaluation of novel telep-resence system and interactive behaviours in 360° virtual environments with a focus on full-view telepresence, spatial perception, locomotion, usability and motion sickness.