Interaction with objects in virtual environments

Abstract

The applications of virtual and augmented reality require high performance equipment normally associated with high costs, inaccessible for small organizations and educational institutions. By adding computing power and storage capacity of several PCs interconnected by a network we have an alternative of high performance and low cost. The objective of this project is to implement an augmented reality platform integrated with items available in the laboratories of an educational institution, such as PCs, webcams, Ethernet networking and free software. This platform is an attractive and economical alternative for the development and implementation of virtual and augmented reality applications to enable low-budget institutions simulate processes, physical phenomena, weather, etc. In this first phase, we have a prototype that creates a scene consisting of a set of virtual objects, the video stream acquired from a Webcam and processes the captured image into a graphic with a set of virtual objects. A user facing the angle of acquisition of the webcam can interact with virtual objects in the scene with only the move of his hand. Although our prototype is reduced to only two computers the first in which images are acquired through the webcam and the second where the mixture, processing and visualization of the scene is made, these early results demonstrate the feasibility of our idea and are a strong motivation for continuing the project. As future work we have planned to increase the number of Webcams, to explore the interaction with complex virtual scenes as well as distributing the processing of the scene among a group of computers to increase the size of the scene displayed. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.