Invisible Mobile Robots Can Make Deliveries To VR & AR, Princeton Researchers Show

Researchers at Princeton made a robot that can deliver food and water to someone in virtual reality.

They call the robot control engine Skynet and the bot wears a VR headset too.

If you’re sitting on the moon in virtual reality and want a drink of coconut water, the researchers show exactly how a robot could actually deliver it to you there without breaking immersion.

The researchers worked for nearly a year on the project which demonstrates the fundamental user interface concept for headsets in both VR and mixed reality. Using a Quest 3 headset, a person could pluck a 3D model of the coconut water from the air, drop it over their desk, and then watch as it slowly materializes. When the object finishes its materialization, the user can pick it up.

The invisible magic of the Princeton research is that, while the drink was materializing, Skynet grabbed it and rolled across the room to place it where the user expected it to be.

What’s more, the researchers show how the robot’s visual presence could be erased entirely, so the object appears to teleport and nothing else distracts them from their chosen task. The researchers even show how the robot could be reskinned as something else.

The work is presented as part of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology, the same conference where research into “proxies” is being presented. Both ideas seem to propose workable solutions that could unlock the true power of headsets as a computing platform.

Proxies Could Be The Key To Interacting With Physical Objects In Mixed Reality

A research paper details how “proxies” can become a core interaction concept for mixed reality.

The “Reality Promises” research is from Mohamed Kari and Parastoo Abtahi and you can find more details about the project on its official website, including a PDF of the paper.