While the promise of autonomous vehicles has led to significant scientific and industrial progress, fully automated, SAE level 5 conform cars will likely not see mass adoption anytime soon. Instead, in many applications, human supervision, such as remote monitoring and teleoperation, will be required for the foreseeable future. While Virtual Reality (VR) has been proposed as one potential interface for teleoperation, its benefits and drawbacks over physical monitoring and teleoperation solutions have not been thoroughly investigated. To this end, we contribute two user studies, comparing the performance of and subjective feedback for a VR-based system with an existing monitoring and teleoperation system, which is in industrial use today. The results of our first user study (n=16), indicate that a VR interface replicating the physical interface does not outperform the physical interface. It also quantifies the negative effects that combined monitoring and teleoperating tasks have on users irrespectively of the interface being used. The results of the second user study (n=24), indicate that the perceptual and ergonomic issues caused by VR outweigh its benefits like better concentration through isolation, which is critical for monitoring tasks. Through these two user studies, we contribute to a better understanding of future virtual monitoring and teleoperation solutions for autonomous vehicles.

翻译：尽管自主车辆的前景推动了科学和工业的重大进步，但完全自动化的SAE L5级汽车短期内不太可能大规模普及。相反，在可预见的未来，许多应用场景仍需人类监督，例如远程监控和遥操作。尽管虚拟现实（VR）被提议作为遥操作的潜在界面之一，但其相较于物理监控与遥操作解决方案的优缺点尚未得到深入研究。为此，我们开展了两次用户研究，将基于VR的系统与目前工业界实际使用的监控及遥操作系统进行性能对比和主观反馈评估。首次用户研究（n=16）的结果表明，复制物理界面的VR界面并未优于物理界面；同时，无论使用何种界面，监控与遥操作任务的结合都会对用户产生负面效应。第二次用户研究（n=24）的结果显示，VR引发的感知和人体工程学问题超过了其优势（例如通过隔离实现更好的专注力，这对监控任务至关重要）。通过这两次用户研究，我们为更深入地理解未来自主车辆的虚拟监控与遥操作解决方案提供了参考。