Limited hand tracking in conjunction with HMD-mounted Leap?
Posted: Thu Sep 19, 2013 5:51 pm
More accurate thread title would have been "Thought's on limited hand tracking in conjunction with HMD-mounted Leap Motion-like systems"
This thought has been in back of my mind for a little while but I figured with the growing VR related hardware market it would have been mentioned by now. Many people here as well as the Leap Motion guys immediately saw the possibilities to having a Leap Motion (or something similar) mounted to an HMD for the purpose of hand tracking (but not just limited to it, of course). In theory, this would work great as long as your hand remains within the optical tracking system's FoV, but that might not always be the case, and in some instances it can be problematic. For example, say you're playing an FPS and have a pistol style controller in hand. While it's within the tracker's FoV everything is fine, but what happens if you're shooting at an object and quickly glance somewhere else so that your hand is no longer being optically tracked? The software could make the assumption that your hand hasn't moved since it was last tracked, but that's just a hack. Of course, there's other motion tracking hardware such as that from Sixense and others, but they're a bit pricey and they make optical systems that I believe are likely to be incorporated in future HMDs to be redundant. One of the cheapest, and relatively most robust methods would seem to be a controller with an IMU. You don't get absolute positioning, but you do get orientation which would be sufficient for most scenarios, and when your hand is within your FoV you see it in the proper position because of the optical tracking system. The good thing is that there are already numerous such devices on the market, but the bad thing is they cost more than they should.
If Oculus is going to have such optical tracking on their consumer HMD, I hope that they consider offering such controllers as a low-cost option to keep VR hardware as affordable as possible.
This thought has been in back of my mind for a little while but I figured with the growing VR related hardware market it would have been mentioned by now. Many people here as well as the Leap Motion guys immediately saw the possibilities to having a Leap Motion (or something similar) mounted to an HMD for the purpose of hand tracking (but not just limited to it, of course). In theory, this would work great as long as your hand remains within the optical tracking system's FoV, but that might not always be the case, and in some instances it can be problematic. For example, say you're playing an FPS and have a pistol style controller in hand. While it's within the tracker's FoV everything is fine, but what happens if you're shooting at an object and quickly glance somewhere else so that your hand is no longer being optically tracked? The software could make the assumption that your hand hasn't moved since it was last tracked, but that's just a hack. Of course, there's other motion tracking hardware such as that from Sixense and others, but they're a bit pricey and they make optical systems that I believe are likely to be incorporated in future HMDs to be redundant. One of the cheapest, and relatively most robust methods would seem to be a controller with an IMU. You don't get absolute positioning, but you do get orientation which would be sufficient for most scenarios, and when your hand is within your FoV you see it in the proper position because of the optical tracking system. The good thing is that there are already numerous such devices on the market, but the bad thing is they cost more than they should.
If Oculus is going to have such optical tracking on their consumer HMD, I hope that they consider offering such controllers as a low-cost option to keep VR hardware as affordable as possible.