Telepresence systems should be designed to assist the human operator as much as possible to fulfill his task. In order to support the user concerning the visual modality, a system was designed that presents virtual reality images combined together with camera images captured at the remote teleoperator environment.

In this work, two experiments were conducted. In the first, it was shown that presenting a widened field of view to the human operator enhances the human performance and the feeling of telepresence. In the second, it was examined how the transition between video and virtual views has to be designed. Relevant criteria of this transition were chosen and the results show that the operator's rating of quality, feeling of telepresence, and situation awareness are positively affected by variations of the transition parameters. Furthermore, a trade-off between the rating of quality and the situation awareness was observed.

A parameter selection scheme is presented which can serve as a design guideline for combining video and virtual views depending on the desired application.

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