Wearable Human Computer Interface for control within immersive VAMR gaming environments using data glove and hand gestures

The continuous advances in the state-of-the-art in the Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality (V AMR) technology are important in many application spaces, including gaming, entertainment, and media technologies. V AMR is part of the broader Human-Computer Interface (HCI) area focused on providing an unprecedentedly immersive way of interacting with computers. These new ways of interacting with computers can leverage the emerging user input devices. In this paper, we present a demonstrator system that shows how our wearable Virtual Reality (VR) Glove can be used with an off-the-shelf head-mounted VR device, the RealWear HMT-1™. We show how the smart data capture glove can be used as an effective input device to the HMT-1™ to control various devices, such as virtual controls, simply using hand gesture recognition algorithms. We describe our fully functional proof-of-concept prototype, along with the complete system architecture and its ability to scale by incorporating other devices

A low cost virtual reality interface for educational games

Mobile virtual reality has the potential to improve learning experiences by making them more immersive and engaging for students. This type of virtual reality also aims to be more cost effective by using a smartphone to drive the virtual reality experience. One issue with mobile virtual reality is that the screen (i.e. main interface) of the smartphone is occluded by the virtual reality headset. To investigate solutions to this issue, this project details the development and testing of a computer vision based controller that aims to have a cheaper per unit cost when compared to a conventional electronic controller by making use of 3D printing and the built-in camera of a smartphone. Reducing the cost per unit is useful for educational contexts as solutions would need to scale to classrooms sizes. The research question for this project is thus, “can a computer vision based virtual reality controller provide comparable immersion to a conventional electronic controller”. It was found that a computer vision based controller can provide comparable immersion, though it is more challenging to use. This challenge was found to contribute more towards engagement as it did not diminish the performance of users in terms of question scores