Parasitic Body: Exploring Perspective Dependency in a Shared Body with a Third Arm

With advancements in robotics, systems featuring wearable robotic arms teleoperated by a third party are appearing. An important aspect of these systems is the visual feedback provided to the third party operator. This can be achieved by placing a wearable camera on the robotic arm's “host,” or Main Body Operator (MBO), but such a setup makes the visual feedback dependant on the movements of the main body. Here we introduce a VR system called Parasitic Body to explore a VR shared body concept representative of the wearable robotic arms “host” (the MBO) and of the teleoperator (here called the Parasite Body Operator (PBO)). 2 users jointly operate a shared virtual body with a third arm: The MBO controls the main body and the PBO controls a third arm sticking out from the left shoulder of the main body. We focused here on the perspective dependency of the PBO (indeed, the PBO view is dependant of the movement of the MBO) in a “finding and reaching” task.