This experiment investigates the spatial memory and attention when human acts as supervisor of one or two groups of distributed robot teams in a large virtual environment (VE). The problem is similar to learning a new environment and interpreting its spatial structure, e.g., [Mou and McNamara 2002], but less is known when attention is divided or locomotion is involved. Our motivation arises in the context of humans and robots acting cooperatively together as a team. Such teaming is becoming increasingly important in many scenarios, such as disaster relief, and wilderness search and rescue [Humphrey and Adams 2009].

This paper presents a mixed reality system for combining real robots, humans, and virtual robots. The system tracks and controls physical robots in local physical space, and inserts them into a virtual environment (VE). The system allows a human to locomote in a VE larger than the physically tracked space of the laboratory through a form of redirected walking. An evaluation assessed the conditions under which subjects found the system to be the most immersive.