Potential of low cost motion sensors compared to programming environments

Abstract

The article investigates systems, which represent a modern and popular approach to Virtual Reality and controlling systems. We would like to focus on low-cost motion sensors used in applications which are oriented on object tracking and gesture recognition. There are various types of sensors. Some of them measure the infrared light reflected from the opposing surface, previously emitted by the device in to gather information about any movement in the observed environment. Another way how to recognize not only a moving object present in the environment, but also its gestures and further characteristics of the movement is to use the Kinect. Therefore, we included Kinect also in our research. There is also a sensoric device called Leap Motion, which is specially developed to analyze gestures of human hands and track their motion with very high accuracy. We will provide pros and cons of every mentioned type of sensors or sensoric devices. Our aim is to summarize specific characteristics of mentioned devices to evaluate their ability to be beneficial in the recently very intensively expanding IoT sector. Considering new trends, we decided to focus on low cost sensors in to make our research more relevant also for small businesses and start-ups whose initiative leads to further development of sensoric soloutions and involving them in IoT. We decided to include also Myo Armband. It uses eight electromyography sensors, combined with a gyroscope and an accelerometer to sense electrical activity produced by the muscles of the forearm. Of the multiple programming environments available, we decided to compare and evaluate three programming engines most frequently used for programming applications processing sensoric data. For gaming purposes, the Unreal and Unity 3D engines are the most frequent. For robotics, medicine or for industrial purposes usually LabVIEW is the best choice. In this, we compare the aforementioned three programming environments using different algorithms, utilizing the three motion controllers, and we discuss their (dis)advantages and programming perspectives.