Extending Telepresent Walking by Motion Compression

Telepresent walking allows visiting remote places such as museums, exhibitions or industrial sites with a high degree of realism. While walking freely around in the user environment, the user sees the remote environment “through the eyes” of a remote mobile teleoperator. For that purpose, the user’s motion is tracked and transferred to the teleoperator. Without additional processing of the motion data, the size of the remote environment to be explored is limited to the size of the user environment. This paper proposes an extension of telepresent walking to arbitrarily large remote or virtual spaces based on compressing wide area motion into the available user space. Motion Compression is a novel technique and does not make use of scaling or walking-in-place metaphors. Turning angles and travel distances are mapped with ratio 1:1.