Enforced telexistence: teleoperating using photorealistic virtual body and haptic feedback

Telexistence [Tachi 2010] systems require physical limbs for remote object manipulation [Fernando et al. 2012]. Having arms and hands synchronized with voluntary movements allows the user to feel robot's body as his body through visual, and haptic sensation. In this method, we introduce a novel technique that provides virtual arms for existing telexistence systems that does not have physical arms. Previous works [Mine et al. 1997; Poupyrev et al. 1998; Nedel et al. 2003] involved the study of using virtual representation of user hands in virtual environments for interactions. In this work, the virtual arms serves for several interactions in a physical remote environment, and most importantly they provide the user the sense of existence in that remote environment. These superimposed virtual arms follows the user's real-time arm movements and reacts to the dynamic lighting of real environment providing photorealistic rendering adapting to remote place lighting. Thus, it allows the user to have an experience of embodied enforcement towards the remote environment. Furthermore, these virtual arms can be extended to touch and feel unreachable remote objects, and to grab a functional virtual copy of a physical instance where device control is possible. This method does not only allow the user to experience a non-existing arm in telexistence, but also gives the ability to enforce remote environment in various ways.