Temporal perception of visual-haptic events in multimodal telepresence system

Multidomal telepresence systems have been used in remote or hazardous environments, such as telesurgery, orbit or underwater teleoperation, etc. (Ballantyne, 2002; Draper et al., 1998; Hirzinger et al., 1993). In a typical teleoperation task, local action commands are transmitted to a remote teleoperator, which then executes the commands and sends back multimodal sensory information, such as visual, auditory and haptic signals. Due to the communication, data encoding, and control scheme, time delays of this information feedback are inevitable in multimodal telepresence systems. These delays can vary from dozens of milliseconds to seconds. For example, the feedback latency for an intercontinental teleoperation via the Internet is around 300 ms (Peer et al., 2008), while the latency can be up to 5–10 seconds for teleoperation tasks in space (Hirzinger et al., 1993).