Controlling First-Person Character Movement: A Low-Cost Camera-based Tracking Alternative for Virtual Reality

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) gaming is a billion-dollar industry that aims at providing a more realistic and exciting immersive experience in computer-simulated environment. Besides hardware capabilities and high-quality 3-D graphics, the feeling of immersion is augmented by incorporating realistic player-game interactions, including the control of game characters movements based on real/natural movements of the player and objects. To this intent, modern VR gaming usually leverages virtual reality headsets and additional devices/sensors whose costs are normally expensive for ordinary games users. In this paper, we propose a low-cost VR gaming system in which the smartphone is used as display and processing units, and its rear camera is used as the main sensor for controlling the character movements in a first-person shooter game (FPS) developed in this work. The VR game system can operate, on average, at 31 frames per second. Regarding the usability, 19 of 24 interviewed users evaluated the character movement precision as good or very good, while 95.8% considered the gun movement as good or very good. Also, all the users would recommend the movement control system as a real-virtual interaction alternative for VR gaming.