A Low-Cost, Wearable Opto-Inertial 6-DOF Hand Pose Tracking System for VR

Andualem Maereg,Tayachew Agidew,Emanuele Secco,David Reid,Atulya Nagar

doi:10.3390/technologies5030049

Andualem Maereg, Tayachew Agidew + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/technologies5030049

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Journal: Technologies	Publication Date: Jul 28, 2017
Citations: 12	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Liverpool Hope University

Abstract

In this paper, a low cost, wearable six Degree of Freedom (6-DOF) hand pose tracking system is proposed for Virtual Reality applications. It is designed for use with an integrated hand exoskeleton system for kinesthetic haptic feedback. The tracking system consists of an Infrared (IR) based optical tracker with low cost mono-camera and inertial and magnetic measurement unit. Image processing is done on LabVIEW software to extract the 3-DOF position from two IR targets and Magdwick filter has been implemented on Mbed LPC1768 board to obtain orientation data. Six DOF hand tracking outputs filtered and synchronized on LabVIEW software are then sent to the Unity Virtual environment via User Datagram Protocol (UDP) stream. Experimental results show that this low cost and compact system has a comparable performance of minimal Jitter with position and orientation Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of less than 0.2 mm and 0.15 degrees, respectively. Total Latency of the system is also less than 40 ms.

Highlights

Physical immersion and highly interactive systems are important for effective virtual reality applications
Experimental results show that this low cost and compact system has a comparable performance of minimal Jitter with position and orientation Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of less than 0.2 mm and 0.15 degrees, respectively
The optical tracking part consists of PlayStation 3 (PS3) eye camera and two IR Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) while the inertial tracker consists of an LSM9DS0 Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) module which contains a 3-axis gyroscope, 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis magnetometer in a single chip

Summary

Introduction

Physical immersion and highly interactive systems are important for effective virtual reality applications. User interactions in Virtual Reality (VR) can be displayed in the form of visual, aural and haptic sensory modalities [1,2,3]. Continuous hand tracking is crucial for a more realistic and immersive virtual experiences. Commercial VR devices such as Oculus Rift headset and HTC VIVETM with the integration of hand tracking systems like Leap Motion Controller enables us to experience “visually realistic” interaction with Virtual objects. Most of these commercial devices does not provide touch feedback (haptics). Optical devices like Leap Motion have limited applicability for VR haptic devices

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