A lightweight and efficient system for tracking handheld objects in virtual reality

Abstract

While the content of virtual reality (VR) has grown explosively in recent years, the advance of designing user-friendly control interfaces in VR still remains a slow pace. The most commonly used device, such as gamepad or controller, has fixed shape and weight, and thus can not provide realistic haptic feedback when interacting with virtual objects in VR. In this work, we present a novel and lightweight tracking system in the context of manipulating handheld objects in VR. Specifically, our system can effortlessly synchronize the 3D pose of arbitrary handheld objects between the real world and VR in realtime performance. The tracking algorithm is simple, which delicately leverages the power of Leap Motion and IMU sensor to respectively track object's location and orientation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system with three VR applications use pencil, ping-pong paddle, and smartphone as control interfaces to provide users more immersive VR experience.