Alternative approach to develop digital hologram interaction system by bounding volumes for identifying object collision

Abstract

Digital holography technology has been considered a powerful method for reconstructing real objects and displaying completed 3D information. Although many studies on holographic displays have been conducted, research on interaction methods for holographic displays is still in an early stage. For developing an appropriate interaction method for digital holograms, a two-way interaction which is able to provide natural interaction between humans and holograms should be considered. However, digital holography technology is not yet fully developed to make holograms capable of naturally responding to human behaviors. Thus, the purpose of this study was to propose an alternative interaction method capable of applying it to interacting with holograms in the future. In order to propose an intuitive interaction method based on computer-generated objects, we utilized a depth camera, Kinect, which provides depth information per pixel. In doing so, humans and environment surrounding them were captured by the depth camera. The captured depth images were simulated on a virtual space and computer graphic objects were generated on the same virtual space. Detailed location information of humans was continuously extracted to provide a natural interaction with the generated objects. In order to easily identify whether two objects were overlapped or not, bounding volumes were generated around both humans and objects, respectively. The local information of the bounding volumes was correlated with one another, which made it possible for humans to control the computer-generated objects. Then, we confirmed a result of interaction through computer generated holograms. As a result, we obtained extreme reduction of computation time accuracy within 80% through bounding volume.