Oculus Rift Driver Controls?

[Bongle]

There's a couple problems I can think of:
1) You'd have to stream some very high quality video from the robot. It sounds like each team will have 5+mbps to work with, but 5mbps only helps you if you're sending compressed video. Uncompressed 1920x1080 video is about 2gbps, or about 400x too much data.

The new control system is probably incapable of compressing video in real time at that bitrate.

2) Assuming you could get high-res, high-quality video transmitted, I bet there'd be lots of situations where the camera just couldn't resolve something you needed to see in the distance. Is that darker gray blob a tote, or is it another robot? You'd have a constant tradeoff between zoom levels and distant detail. You'd want a wide FOV to maneuver the bot, but a narrow one to distinguish things with detail more than a couple feet away.

Both those things said, it is probably possible to do and would be very neat, I just don't think the work required to make it happen would be worth it.

Personally, I think the most practical way to utilize an Oculus Rift or similar device is as an augmented reality Heads Up Display, rather than an all out video feed from the robot.

The problem is that you'd be confining the driver to a 1280x720 (DK1) or 1920x1080 (DK2)-resolution view of the world. It'd be hard to distinguish robot details looking through a OR. A HUD _would_ be good, but a better implementation might be to build a helmet with a phone mounted on top, and have a phone app that talks to your robot.
Here's a CAD model: