One main goal of high fidelity telepresence Systems is to provide the user a superior feeling of presence. Different factors like noise, sensor resolution and time delays are known to influence the "feeling of actually being there" as presence is often defined in psychological terms. Currently there is no mathematical formulation for the concept of presence or immersion considering time delays. For engineering needs, however, an objective function taking into consideration the different influence factors on the capability of a system to give presence feeling is desirable and useful. It could be used for e.g. objective optimization, system design and evaluation. As multiple modalities are involved in Telepresence Systems, asynchronies between the different senses must be taken into account as well as the overall system latency from the command input to the sensor feedback from the system. The combination of engineering system design together with psychophysical analysis of human behavior and perception makes this field of research highly interdisciplinary.

This project is embedded in the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 453 (Project M9) of the DFG. Collaborating researchers are Dr. Zhuanghua Shi and his team from the Department of Experimental Psychology from LMU.