Can observers exploit enhanced motion parallax to control reaching movements within telepresence environments?

The experiments reported here were designed to address two aims. The first was to determine the sufficiency of head-generated motion parallax, when present in isolation, for the control of natural prehensile movements. The second was to assess the consequences of providing enhanced parallax information for prehension. Enhanced parallax was created by changing the spatial extent of the movement of a camera (which was slaved in time with the side-to-side movement of the observer) relative to the extent of the teleoperator's head movements. The gain (i.e. head/camera separation or movement) ranged from 0.5 to 4. The scene was viewed for 2 secs before reaches were made in open-loop conditions. Results showed clearly that information from motion parallax is sufficient to support reliable and accurate motor movements. The enhanced information, led to predictable distortions in perceived size and distance and corresponding alterations in the transport and grip components. The results suggest that the provision of parallax information is beneficial for tasks requiring the recovery of metric depth information. However, if enhanced parallax is used, which facilitates performance