Usefulness of observer-controlled camera angle in telepresence systems depends on the nature of the task: passive perceptual judgments compared to perceptual motor performance

摘要

Many telepresence systems have the capacity to 'slave' camera orientation to the observer's head movements. This results in mimicking the changes in the visual field that would be produced by the observer's head movements. In theory this should result in enhanced depth perception, but in practice the effect often appears to be weak. We report a series of experiments that explore the benefit of providing observer generated motion information (OGMI) across a range of perceptual and perceptual motor tasks. Experiment 1 found that when OGMI was the sole source of depth information observers were able to exploit it in a simple depth judgement task. However, Experiment 2 found that it was unimportant that the motion information was generated by the observer; rather relative motion within the image was sufficient. Experiment 3 used a simple depth adjustment task and found that if subjects first did the task without OGMI they did not benefit by its subsequent availability, suggesting that use of OGMI is not automatic. Experiments 4 and 5 used tracking tasks and found no gain from making OGMI available relative to static viewing of the video image. Overall the results confirm that OGMI confers only weak gains on the accuracy of spatial tasks and that the magnitude of the gains are task dependent.