Design and user experience assessment of Kinect-based virtual windows

Abstract

Nowadays, it is technologically feasible to augment an interior or closed room by creating virtual windows. This paper describes a fully functional system designed to virtually emulate a window by using Kinect-based tracking, prerecorded videos, and COTS hardware (standard PCs and Full HD TVs). The key aspects of the overall architecture design are covered, focusing specially on the enabling user tracking filters and the image transformation approaches. The Virtual Window System (VWS) is able to control one or two synchronized windows and simulate the perspective changes on the image seen by the user as s/he freely moves; additionally, it allows to configure the working logic depending on the characterization of the video to be handled. As the VWS core-tracking component can be configured by tuning different parameters (e.g. related to tracking filters and perspective transformations), the paper includes the methodology and results of a rigorous user satisfaction assessment, in which the subjective impact of different system configurations is compared through a sign test. Although several configurations offer a reasonable experience, users agree on the combination that is providing the best one. When applying this choice, the virtual windows are able to provide a good simulation of a real scene.