Oculus Rift-Based System Brings True Immersion To Telepresence Robots

An anonymous reader writes: University of Pennsylvania researchers have built an Oculus Rift-based telepresence system that attempts to bring true immersion to remotely operated robots. The system, called DORA (Dexterous Observational Roving Automaton), precisely tracks the motion of your head and then duplicates those motions on a mobile robot moving around at a remote location. Video from the robot's cameras is transmitted to the Oculus headset. One of the creators said that while using the system you "feel like you are transported somewhere else in the real world."

Wouldn't it make more sense...

[popo]

To film an entire "sphere" of video simultaneously, and then have the Oculus (client) display a subset of that data depending on where the user was looking?

That system would not only involve fewer moving parts, but less movement-related lag. It would also allow multiple simultaneous users to access the vantage point.

Re:

[michelcolman]

You could put on three spheres, so that any objects are always visible by at least two of them. Then you can do some processing (quite a lot of processing, actually) to synthesize the images that would have been seen by two cameras at a fixed distance from each other pointing in any particular direction. I'm not saying it's easy, but certainly feasible with today's processing power. And it would result in less lag than actually having to physically move the cameras. Also, multiple people could use the same

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not really as hard as you make it sound. You don't need 360 capture, you only need the visible frustum plus 5/10 degrees each way, so 180 capture would look over engineered, and 120 capture would probably do it at a pinch. You only need the data that you don't have time to reacquire, and heads can't move that fast, while servos can move faster, so you're only covering latency really. And if you capture from two cameras the right distance apart, you don't need any fancy postprocessing, just basic Car

Re:

[lordofthechia]

You don't need 360 capture

Sure you do. What if the user decides to rotate their head 360 degrees in less time than the current latency to the remote system?

Re: Wouldn't it make more sense...

[slick7]

Using 6 fixed Oculi ? in all three axes, front, back; left, right; up, down; would possibly create a basic overlay for the primary, movable Oculus; so that any lag time would be shortened or eliminated.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on the application.

First off this is not new at all. University of Tsukuba/Cyberdyne in Japan have developed a similar system, except it goes far beyond that into also using a master/slave system using an exoskeleton with VR googles linked to a robotic platform (http://cyberdyne.jp/company/PressReleases_detail.html?id=2783).

As for the actual, camera system, it's important to realize that 3D vision is not just stereo vision.
Being able to focus your eyes in different objects is also a very important e

Oculus and Facebook so happy for you guys!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Mr Zuckerberg and Facebook And Oculus. Great job guys hyping a product for consumers for years now. Fantastic really, but yea it turned out you weren't there yet... in fact not at all... so you decided fuck it will we just make them for robots. And so you did, and now were supposed to rally and discuss whatever is your latest change the world shit fuck product riding on in along with the rest of the automation apocalypse. Hip hip hooraaaayy

Honey, I shrunk the kids

[renesch]

Would be fascinating to have such a robot at a tiny scale, and then run around in your garden

Re:

[psithurism]

Would be fascinating to have such a robot at a massive scale, and then run around your planet(s).

Re:

[antdude]

Yay, robotic ants! :D

Nausea

[Graydyn Young]

As anybody who's used an Occulus will tell you, even slight differences between vision and head movement can cause a lot of nausea. So imagine what using this device is going to be like, where you not only have to deal with a slight lag, but also a delay based off the movement of the robot's head. I strongly suspect that nobody will be able to use this device for more than a couple minutes.

Re:

[Crookdotter]

What if the rift was mounted on an arm that you couldn't move so fast, limiting the movement and hence the lag?

Re:

[Lennie]

That doesn't work, probably makes it worse, it needs to be as close to what you are doing

If you want to get an idea of how well it works or doesn't you might enjoy watching the panel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Re:

[Lennie]

Recently someone found out a virtual nose helps a lot, so maybe that will help:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/... [arstechnica.com]

This brings us one step closer..

[almitydave]

This brings us one step closer to DUI Telepresence Crown Victoria Figure-8 racing [jalopnik.com]!

Teleconference

[RyoShin]

I've always wondered about something like this, but with a teleconference. Multiple locations around the globe would have a room with the exact same size/shape/furniture, but it's all rather mundane and painted green. The participants in each location wear VR goggles; cameras around the room take 3D visuals of the room's participants, and then combine all the rooms in VR along with giving nice decorum to the mundane room, customizable by group. (Want it to have giant windows so you can watch Godzilla destro