Telepresence racing game

Telepresence enables users to interact with and experience "real" environments by providing the display and means of interaction using sensors and actuators. In this demonstration, we apply the concept of telepresence to the good old sports car racing game. The user remotely controls, from a desktop computer, a toy car that is situated in a remote environment and equipped with wireless stereo-cameras and other sensors. The experience of the user is enriched by the information displayed to the user, namely the live stereo image and artificial multimodal special effects generated from the information from the sensors. The proposed telepresence game is expected to offer a different kind of fun and excitement compared to the 3D graphics based counterparts because the user does not have to suspend one's disbelief, and has to be aware and conscious of the actual physical implications of one's action. In the actual demo, two telepresence toy cars will run on a small mock up race track (thus requiring two control PC's).