Your own home as your VR playground

[voliale]

I guess you've all seen the videos of people generating meshes using Kinect:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s8UdUAEJK8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZrmPLas66E

When the Rift becomes wireless (or embedded) and has true positional tracking, how cool wouldn't it be to generate a 3D map of your own home and use that mesh as your "VR collision mesh".

You could do simple stuff like remove the roof or a wall and replace it with clear blue skies and a beach.

Or, you could could do more advanced stuff. Like use the mesh only as a template for your own assets, and build your very own (though probably oddly shaped) spaceship. With some clever programming your custom meshes, materials, even gameplay elements, could be distributed automatically.

And if the Rift had a Kinect-like camera you could use the Rift itself to do the 3D mapping.

[cerulianbaloo]

It would be pretty cool to have most of your home scanned/modeled, and have like one wall just knocked out, instead showing some crazy background, like overlooking the edge of a waterfall, lush valley etc. You could have the whole thing intact when you first put the Rift on, and press a button that whisks away the walls and/or ceiling around you, thus hammering home the whole VR experience that much more. Lots of potential with this idea.

[voliale]

It would be pretty cool to have most of your home scanned/modeled, and have like one wall just knocked out, instead showing some crazy background, like overlooking the edge of a waterfall, lush valley etc. You could have the whole thing intact when you first put the Rift on, and press a button that whisks away the walls and/or ceiling around you,.

And that button could even be a real physical button. The mapping process could define features such as light switches, doors, faucets and, using an onboard camera, track and update those features continuously.

(Removing only a single wall would however be more challenging than replacing the entire scene as it would be AR rather than VR and require pass-through video - or very detailed 3D/texture mapping.)

[Omarzuqo]

Oh my god!!!

I just saw this in the related videos.

[youtube-hd]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzb_RQWrt6I&hd=1[/youtube-hd]

I can't believe that the kinect was capable of doing this in real time.
Seriously, someone needs to mount kinect type cameras ot in a HMD (that is with you, Oculus people!).

Why haven't I seen this videos before and why hasn't kinfu been discussed here!?

[STRZ]

A augmented reality window would be cool, so i could look at the beach while living in the ugliest suburban ghetto

[vtms]

Wow! Let's digitize the whole cities so they can be explored in VR.

[cerulianbaloo]

@STRZ: lol, I know that desire all too well.

@Omarzuqo: that's pretty awesome, didn't know kinect could be used to render objects with that much detail. I'm betting kinect 2.0 to be a lot better for that as well. I always wondered about those dots cause they put it in one of those paranormal activity movies, didnt know till now you needed a night vision camera to see them.

[geekmaster]

Awesome with extra awesome sauce! It is the most highly awesomized digitizing solution I have seen yet. But I cannot find a download link!

[STRZ]

Wow! Let's digitize the whole cities so they can be explored in VR.

[youtube-hd]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIEmf8T6auc[/youtube-hd]

That's probably the easiest method, sort of Google car with a laser scanner (or a supersized Kinect..lol) on the roof scanning the environment driving through the city!

[ChrisJD]

"Skinning" the world differently in real time is an AR/VR (not really sure which you would call it) feature I've wanted ever since I read one of Peter F. Hamiltons books that described a pair of glasses a kid put on that did just that.

[Direlight]

Seems like object scanning could drastically reduce mapping and modeling time with 3d engines. For example, walk around the mall while scanning, then convert it to a multiplayer map.

[cerulianbaloo]

I wonder how resource heavy a street scene like that would be, assuming the environment wasn't too large and texture size was kept lower.

[colocolo]

thats a really cool idea, i had the same too.
the beach in front of the house
i also imagined that having a stargate in front of the Omni would be nice through which you can enter different worlds.
or implementing your room as a virtual start point in a game.
so that you can move around in your room but if you wish to leave it you would have to jump onto the Omni.

[twofoe]

It'd be cool to make your house the house from "UP." Open your front door and just sit down and enjoy the view as you travel slowly above the clouds.

[Omarzuqo]

"Skinning" the world differently in real time is an AR/VR (not really sure which you would call it) [...]

I was thinking the same. I suppose it's hybrid, because all you see is a virtual version of the real world with augmented reality elements.

Anyway, it's extremely exciting to see AR/VR progress so quickly, I thought this kind of applications (AR without see-trough display or AR markers) was about 10 years from now.

Looks like a home version of "Project holodeck" is not very far fetched with this method.

[squibbfire]

Oh my god!!!

I just saw this in the related videos.


I can't believe that the kinect was capable of doing this in real time.
Seriously, someone needs to mount kinect type cameras ot in a HMD (that is with you, Oculus people!).

Why haven't I seen this videos before and why hasn't kinfu been discussed here!?

Does this scan textures too?? Imagine these cameras on mini automated drones!

[Additives]

"Skinning" the world differently in real time is an AR/VR (not really sure which you would call it) feature I've wanted ever since I read one of Peter F. Hamiltons books that described a pair of glasses a kid put on that did just that.

Turned everything into caves if I remember? So exciting to see that some of the tech for those books (written in the last 2 decades and set 700 years into the future) is actually starting to filter into the real world now.

Although if I had to chose, FTL space travel still wins out over VR, but hey, I can dream, right?

[voliale]

Oh my god!!!
I just saw this in the related videos.

I can't believe that the kinect was capable of doing this in real time.
Seriously, someone needs to mount kinect type cameras ot in a HMD (that is with you, Oculus people!).

Why haven't I seen this videos before and why hasn't kinfu been discussed here!?

Does this scan textures too?? Imagine these cameras on mini automated drones!

Like this?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiNX-vpDhMo[/youtube]