rick@hanauma (Richard Ottolini) (11/17/89)
This December's Scientific American has an article called "Teleoperators". It is about sensory and action linkups between human beings and remote robots. It shares some aspects of virtual reality systems. One similarity is the substitution of sensory information, in this case mainly visual, audio and kinesthetic. In virtual reality, the replacement is often with entirely synthetic sensations, whereas teleoperation is with unprocessed to highly computer enchanced remote sensations. A second similarity is alteration of the sensory feedback by bodily motions. A third similarity are unusual psychological states induced by semi-successful fooling of the mind by these replacement sensations. In teleoperation this is called "remote presence". (Computer graphics is used in both to modify or create the visual sensations.)