In telerobotics a human operator commands a remote robot. The separation of robot and human operator may occur due to spatial distance, hazardous environmental conditions, scaling, or even matter, in the case of virtual environments.
In telepresence, the human operator will immerse into a remote environment and control a tele-operated device on a motion / force level. By means of a multimodal human machine interface (HMI) the human perceives and acts as in the real world.
Nowadays, virtual reality technologies are able to generate realistic images of virtual scenes that can hardly be distinguished from photographs. The next step towards increasing the level of reality is to make possible intuitively manipulating objects in a virtual scene, while feeding back haptic information to the human user.
