Set up three Kinect cameras in an equilateral triangle, use an Oculus Rift as a head-mounted display, merge all that with a virtual office environment and you got yourself your own 3D conference room… with some glitches.
But glitches could make any boring presentation or conference a lot funnier.
The creators tell us on their blog how it works:
I decided to embed the live 3D video into a virtual 3D model of an office, to show a possible setting for remote collaboration / tele-presence (more on that coming soon), and to contrast the “raw” nature of the 3D video with the much more polished look of the 3D model. One of the things we’ve noticed since we started working with 3D video to create “holographic” avatars many years ago was that, even with low-res and low-quality 3D video, the resulting avatars just feel real, in some sense even more real than higher-quality motion-captured avatars. I believe it’s related to the uncanny valley principle, in that fuzzy 3D video that moves in a very lifelike fashion is more believable to the brain than high-quality avatars that don’t quite move right.
3D Video Capture with Three Kinects [YouTube]
Comments
5 responses to “What It Looks Like To Put Your Entire Body In Virtual Reality”
That is amazing, the future can’t get here soon enough.
Pretty impressive how fast the video feed works compared to the usual skeletal conversion. Looking at that video, I can just imagine how awesome something like that would be combined with the likes of the occulus rift. Obviously a lot more work to be done on it yet, but damn! Considering what they used to accomplish it, that’s pretty hawt!
Kind of makes me wonder though, how they would implement an interaction system to make it more… interactive! 😉 Or perhaps realistically interactive. They have interaction by way of the device in his hand, but to really make it fun/useful, they’ll likely have to use a skeleton or make some kind of bounding box algorithm that generates an interaction field around the body based on the video feed. Does the second gen kinect perform any better with the skeletal stuff?
Where are the naked ladies?
Don’t tell me he’s gone to all this effort and not put any naked virtual ladies in there to ogle!
Thought the same thing.
too many internets
Thats incredible
Awesome! Except for the fact that everyone in a virtual conference would be wearing Oculus rifts on their faces 😛