Unified framework for handling motion input?
Hi,
While being very excited about the Rift i am also a bit about how new first person avatar based games will be able to incorporate various motion tracking in a consistent manner. From trying the Rift my impression is that the sense of your body being there adds tremendously to the immersion, but only in a limited manner if it doesn't match up with your own movement.
For example, right now we have the Rift with its rotational head tracking as well as the hydra (usually for tracking hand movements). If i create a new game right now ( i wont, because while i am a developer, i am not a game developer (though the Oculus makes me want to be ;)), i would probably add support explicitly for the head tracker and hydra. But what if someone adds a kinect to the mix to track walking, rotational tracking of the body (as in walking direction != view direction), some sort of ODT (Omni etc) that might provide detailed tracking of the feet movement etc? Each game will have to do individual support for handling this sort of thing. That includes handling merging the tracking information as well as supporting each individual device as well as coming up with a control scheme for interpreting the tracked data (ie is the hydras being used for hands, or one for body one for an arm etc).
In general i am worried that we will get a lot of games supporting for example the hydra, and then someone comes up with a cool new way of doing motion tracking, and none of the existing games will support it. It would be nice to route this trough a a framework, so new tracking information can be added and consumed easily.
This is already an issue now, games might support independently aim and look, but since there isn't really a good way of tracking walking direction, they might not support independent movement direction as well even though its not that tricky from an implementation point.
From the game point of view i would argue that it really just wants someone to give it a representation of position of the players body (skeleton or possibly more than that), not caring how much is really being motion tracked or how. Ie. if it so happens that the player has a means to track his feet/hands then fine, if not, then it is also fine, the movement just being emulated by keyboard input through the framework.
Of course, additional tracked items like weapons could also be supported, but will of course be potentially more specific to the type of game, and one might consider certain body position shortcuts like crouching etc that doesn't necessarily require full motion tracking.
So, are there any such framework (i am sure i am not the first one to consider this)? I noticed OpenNI/Nite, but i don't know if it is general enough, or if it is too tied to the concept of kinect-like cameras. Or perhaps it is a stupid idea altogether because it provides too much of an abstraction? Or perhaps Oculus will just come up with its own full motion tracking and integrate support for it in their SDK ?
While being very excited about the Rift i am also a bit about how new first person avatar based games will be able to incorporate various motion tracking in a consistent manner. From trying the Rift my impression is that the sense of your body being there adds tremendously to the immersion, but only in a limited manner if it doesn't match up with your own movement.
For example, right now we have the Rift with its rotational head tracking as well as the hydra (usually for tracking hand movements). If i create a new game right now ( i wont, because while i am a developer, i am not a game developer (though the Oculus makes me want to be ;)), i would probably add support explicitly for the head tracker and hydra. But what if someone adds a kinect to the mix to track walking, rotational tracking of the body (as in walking direction != view direction), some sort of ODT (Omni etc) that might provide detailed tracking of the feet movement etc? Each game will have to do individual support for handling this sort of thing. That includes handling merging the tracking information as well as supporting each individual device as well as coming up with a control scheme for interpreting the tracked data (ie is the hydras being used for hands, or one for body one for an arm etc).
In general i am worried that we will get a lot of games supporting for example the hydra, and then someone comes up with a cool new way of doing motion tracking, and none of the existing games will support it. It would be nice to route this trough a a framework, so new tracking information can be added and consumed easily.
This is already an issue now, games might support independently aim and look, but since there isn't really a good way of tracking walking direction, they might not support independent movement direction as well even though its not that tricky from an implementation point.
From the game point of view i would argue that it really just wants someone to give it a representation of position of the players body (skeleton or possibly more than that), not caring how much is really being motion tracked or how. Ie. if it so happens that the player has a means to track his feet/hands then fine, if not, then it is also fine, the movement just being emulated by keyboard input through the framework.
Of course, additional tracked items like weapons could also be supported, but will of course be potentially more specific to the type of game, and one might consider certain body position shortcuts like crouching etc that doesn't necessarily require full motion tracking.
So, are there any such framework (i am sure i am not the first one to consider this)? I noticed OpenNI/Nite, but i don't know if it is general enough, or if it is too tied to the concept of kinect-like cameras. Or perhaps it is a stupid idea altogether because it provides too much of an abstraction? Or perhaps Oculus will just come up with its own full motion tracking and integrate support for it in their SDK ?