Delivering Real Reality to the World Wide Web via Telerobotics

Robots provide us with a means to move around in, visualize, and interact with a remote physical world. We have exploited these physical properties coupled with the growing diversity of users on the World Wide Web (WWW) [1] to create a WWW based telerobotic remote environment browser. This browser, called Mechanical Gaze, allows multiple remote WWW users to control a robot arm with an attached camera to explore a real remote environment. The environment varies but is typically composed of collections of physical museum exhibits which WWW users can view at various positions, orientations, and levels of resolution. http://vive.cs.berkeley.edu/capek 1 Introduction We have designed this teleoperated WWW server in order to allow users throughout the world to visit actual remote spaces and exhibits. It also serves as a useful scientific tool by promotingdiscussion about the physical specimens in the browser such as insects, live reptiles, rare museum collections, and recently discovered a..