Touching is believing - Adding real objects to virtual reality

Abstract

This article presents the idea of adding real objects representations to Virtual Reality as a way to improve the immersive experience. To this end, a low-cost hand tracking device and an instrumented cube based on the use of inertial measurement units is presented. Some preliminary results that show the use of the hand tracker for the animation of a virtual hand model are shown. The fusion of inertial measures with a vision-based marker detector outputs will be performed with the help of a Kalman filter to provide smooth and bias corrected estimates of the object pose. The developed solutions offer the flexibility of interacting either with local or remote systems, as they have been designed as wireless Internet connected objects.