CHAPTER 55 The Virtual Camera Concept: A Third Person View Guy A. Boy 1 , Rebecca Mazzone 2 , Michael Conroy 2 1 Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) 40 South Alcaniz Street, Pensacola, Florida 32502, U.S.A. 2 NASA Kennedy Space Center Information Technology Division, Mail Code IT, Florida 32899, U.S.A. ABSTRACT A virtual camera (VC) encapsulates the “third person view” concept. This paper presents the VC perspective in planetary exploration. The concept was initially designed to support astronauts driving a Lunar rover. We extended the VC concept to robotic support to planetary exploration from the Earth. Human-computer interaction properties are presented together with a use case. Furthermore, the VC concept can be extended to a collaborative sensing-acting multi-agent system that is introduced in the balance of the paper. Keywords: Virtual camera, planetary exploration, HCI, multi-agent systems. INTRODUCTION The virtual camera (VC) concept emerged from the early test of the Lunar Electric Rover (LER) developed by NASA for the exploration of the Moon. Indeed, driving a vehicle in a seldom known environment is a difficult task. Even in a well-known environment such as reconstructed scenery of the moon at Johnson Space Center, we realized that the astronaut driving the LER needed external advice to move 1 Dr. Boy is also affiliated with the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT), 150 West University Boulevard, Melbourne, Florida 32901, U.S.A. Advances in Cognitive Ergonomics Edited by D . Kaber and G . Boy CRC Press 2010 Pages 551–559 Print ISBN: 978-1-4398-3491-6 eBook ISBN: 978-1-4398-3492-3 DOI: 10.1201/EBK1439834916-c55