Reconstructed Reality: Enabling Teleportation-Based Locomotion in Immersive Telepresence

High latency and virtual reality (VR) sickness hinders the mass adoption of telepresence or teleoperated systems utilizing head-mounted displays (HMDs). In immersive telepresence scenarios that use 360 degree cameras to present the remote environment, latencies of up to seconds are expected. Such delays make traditional continuous manual control of these systems difficult. In addition, due to the use of HMDs, users of these systems are prone to VR sickness. We present a novel method to enable an improved telepresence locomotion experience under these constraints. The paper first recounts a previously published article of a prototype design, and then integrates new findings of a realistic use-case, replicating and extending these findings. We conclude that it is highly beneficial to use teleportation through a real-time 3D reconstructed virtual environment as an interface to a physical environment (VEIPE) in embodied immersive telepresence, relative to a standard joystick-based continuous control method.