Telexistence: Fusing Virtual Reality, Robotics and Networks Together

Telexistence is fundamentally a concept named for the technology that enables a human being to have a real-time sensation of being at a place other than where he or she actually exists, and to interact with the remote environment, which may be real, virtual, or a combination of both. It also refers to an advanced type of teleoperation system that enables an operator at the control to perform remote tasks dexterously with the feeling of existing in a surrogate robot. Although conventional telexistence systems provide an operator the real-time sensation of being in a remote environment, persons in the remote environment have only the sensation that a surrogate robot is present, not the operator. Mutual telexistence aims to solve this problem so that the existence of the operator is apparent to persons in the remote environment by providing mutual sensations of presence. This paper reviews how the original telexistence technology has been developed, and describes a newly developed method of mutual telexistence using projection technology onto retro-reflective objects dubbed RPT (Retroreflective Projection Technology).