Delay Compensation for Actuated Stereoscopic 360 Degree Telepresence Systems with Probabilistic Head Motion Prediction

Communication delay is a major challenge for the acceptance of telepresence applications. It is particularly critical when the user experiences the remote environment via a Head-Mounted-Display. The lag between head motion and display response results in motion sickness, indisposition, and, at worst, abortion of the telepresence session. In this paper, we propose a delay compensation approach for 3D 360° telepresence systems realized with a mechanically actuated stereoscopic vision system. We further introduce a novel metric to evaluate the achievable level of delay compensation. We investigate state-of-the-art head motion predictors and propose a novel probabilistic prediction paradigm, which can half the mean prediction error and improve the level of delay compensation by up to 26%. The general validity of our approach is shown by means of two independent real head motion datasets. The experimental results verify that average compensation rates of more than 99% can be achieved for communication delays between 100-500ms.