David Gossow at Willow Garage integrated the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset into RViz and, based on that, created a package for the PR2 robot called PR2 Surrogate. It lets you teleoperate a PR2 using the Oculus Rift and the Razer Hydra game controllers. The ROS community has been working closely with him to make this publicly available and are announcing its release into ROS Groovy Galapagos and Hydro Medusa. Wired's Bruce Sterling quipped: "There must be any number of handy applications for this capability, such as, uh, tasering people at your doorway and them going through their possessions with your telepresence robot arms."

The Oculus Rift is a virtual reality headset that gives you a fully immersive 3D experience by combining an extremely wide field of view and low latency head tracking. It is scheduled to be commercially available in 2014, but a developer kit can be obtained now. The Razer Hydra game controllers consist of two paddles you hold in your hands that precisely track position and orientation in space. In addition, the controllers have standard joysticks and buttons you find on most gamepads.