The Utility of Measures of Attention and Situation Awareness for Quantifying Telepresence

Abstract

Telepresence is defined as the sensation of being present at a remote robot task site while physically present at a local control station. This concept has received substantial attention in the recent past as a result of hypothesized benefits of "presence" experiences on human task performance with teleoperation systems. Human factors research, however, has made little progress in establishing a relationship between the concept of telepresence and teleoperator performance. This has been attributed to the multidimensional nature of telepresence, the lack of appropriate studies to elucidate this relationship, and the lack of a valid and reliable, objective measure of telepresence. Subjective measures (e.g., questionnaires, rating scales) are most commonly used to measure telepresence. Objective measures have been proposed, including behavioral responses to stimuli presented in virtual worlds (e.g. ducking virtual objects). Other research has suggested use of physiological measures, such as cardiovascular responses