Full body interaction in virtual reality with affordable hardware

Abstract

Summary form only given. Recently a number of affordable game controllers have been adopted by virtual reality (VR) researchers [1][4]. We present a video1 of a VR demo called TurboTuscany, where we employ such controllers; our demo combines a Kinect controlled full body avatar with Oculus Rift head-mounted-display [2]. We implemented three positional head tracking schemes that use Kinect, Razer Hydra, and PlayStation (PS) Move controllers. In the demo the Kinect tracked avatar can be used to climb ladders, play with soccer balls, and otherwise move or interact with physically simulated objects. PS Move or Razer Hydra controller is used to control locomotion, and for selecting and manipulating objects. Our subjective experience is that the best head tracking immersion is achieved by using Kinect together with PS Move, as the latter is more accurate and responsive while having a large tracking volume. We also noticed that Oculus Rift's orientation tracking has less latency than any of the positional trackers that we used, while Razer Hydra has less latency than PS Move, and Kinect has the largest latency. Besides positional tracking, our demo uses these three trackers to correct the yaw drift of Oculus Rift. TurboTuscany was developed by using our RUIS toolkit, which is a software platform for VR application development [3]. The demo and RUIS toolkit can be downloaded online2.