Remote control technology for machines and robots has experienced significant advancement in many domains where visual information delivery is essential. Safety management at airports is one field that benefits from remote control systems, enabling operators to scan the airstrip for obstacles and debris. Depth perception and proper view position are critical in remote control systems, where operators need to accurately perceive 3D coordinates and maintain an appropriate perspective for performing tasks from a distance. This Demo paper presents a laboratory platform for an experimental study on human interaction with remote control systems using visual interfaces for inspection tasks to enhance airport safety management. The platform can evaluate the user experience of interfaces provided by First Person View, Third Person View, and Augmentation technologies. This platform enables exploration through controlled experiments and by user tests. These provide an avenue for assessing how these interfaces may affect human performance, depth perception, and user experience when conducting inspection tasks remotely. The findings will shed light on the strengths and limitations of each interface type, offering insights into their potential applications in various domains such as industrial inspection, surveillance, and remote exploration. 

In this study, we designed an experiment using remote-controlled lab based moving platform to evaluate the impact of resolution, latency, and field of view on the Quality of Experience, performance, user experience and depth perception. The experiment involves two tasks: driving the platform to a stop point and parking it between two boxes. Participants provided feedback through questionnaires, and their experiences were analyzed. Seven participants between 30 and 57 (average of 37) years old participated. We used Google Forms for data collection, including pre-experiment and recurring questionnaires as well as a simulator sickness questionnaire. Despite the low number of test participants leading to uncertainty in quantitative analysis, significant effects were observed, albeit with contradictory statistical outcomes. The data suggests that lower latency corresponds to better performance, with participants not always perceiving higher latency accurately. Video quality notably impacts user experience, with higher resolution being preferred. 

Tele-operated driving enables industrial operators to control heavy machinery remotely. By doing so, they could work in improved and safe workplaces. However, some challenges need to be investigated while presenting visual information from on-site scenes for operators sitting at a distance in a remote site. This paper discusses the impact of video quality (spatial resolution), field of view, and latency on users’ depth perception, experience, and performance in a lab-based tele-operated application. We performed user experience evaluation experiments to study these impacts. Overall, the user experience and comfort decrease while the users’ performance error increases with an increase in the glass-to-glass latency. The user comfort reduces, and the user performance error increases with reduced video quality (spatial resolution).

Recent advancement in multimedia and communication network technology have made interactive multimedia and tele-operation applications possible. Teledriving, teleoperation, and video-based remote-controlling require real-time live-video streaming and are delay critical in principle. Supporting such applications over wireless networks for mobile users can pose fundamental challenges in maintaining video quality and service latency requirements. This paper investigates the factors affecting the end-to-end delay in a video-based, remotely controlled moving platform application. It involves the real-time acquisition of environmental information (visually) and the delay-sensitive video streaming to remote operators over wireless networks. This paper presents an innovative experimental testbed developed using a remote-controlled toy truck, off-the-shelf cameras, and wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) network. It achieves ultra-low end-to-end latency and helped us in performing the delay, network, and video quality evaluations. Extending the experimental study, we also propose a real-time live-media streaming control (RTSC) algorithm that maximizes the video quality by selecting the best streaming (network, video, and camera) configuration while meeting the delay and network availability constraints. RTSC improves the live-streaming video quality by about 33% while meeting the ultra-low latency (< 200 milliseconds) requirement under constrained network availability conditions.

Remote operation and Augmented Telepresence are fields of interest for novel industrial applications in e.g., construction and mining. In this study, we report on an ongoing investigation of the Quality of Experience aspects of an Augmented Telepresencesystem for remote operation. The system can achieve view augmentation with selective content removal and Novel Perspective view generation. Two formal subjective studies have been performed with test participants scoring their experience while using the system with different levels of view augmentation. The participants also gave free-form feedback on the system and their experiences. The first experiment focused on the effects of in-view augmentations and interface distributions on wall patterns perception. The second one focused on the effects of augmentations on depth and 3D environment understanding. The participants’ feedback from experiment 1 showed that the majority of participants preferred to use the original cam-era views and the Disocclusion Augmentation view instead of the novel Perspective views. Moreover, the Disocclusion Augmentation, which was shown in combination with other views seemed beneficial. When the views were isolated in experiment 2, the impact of the Disocclusion Augmentation view was found to be lower than the Novel Perspective views.