Using a camera inside the Rift
For some time I've been interested in creating a more immersive communications experience than something like a video call in Skype would allow - something that feels more like a face to face encounter.
I was thinking of using a Kinect sensor with the open source Kinfu (http://pointclouds.org/documentation/tutorials/using_kinfu_large_scale.php) to create real-time texture mapped 3d models of people, then manipulating the models to, say, put people around a virtual table (or whatever else) that's displayed on a Rift. However, since all these people would be wearing Rifts, no one could see each other's eyes. Since eye contact is such an important part of communication, that wouldn't work very well.
I was thinking about putting one or two very small cameras inside the rift to get facial images and try (perhaps with the help of some photos taken beforehand) to paste the facial images into the texture mapped model.
Is there enough space or light inside the Rift for the cameras to work?
I realize this would probably be easier with a CAVE VR system, but that would of course be much more expensive, and I'd like to make something useful for normal people (if people who have a Kinect, Rift, and beefy GPU are normal).
I was thinking of using a Kinect sensor with the open source Kinfu (http://pointclouds.org/documentation/tutorials/using_kinfu_large_scale.php) to create real-time texture mapped 3d models of people, then manipulating the models to, say, put people around a virtual table (or whatever else) that's displayed on a Rift. However, since all these people would be wearing Rifts, no one could see each other's eyes. Since eye contact is such an important part of communication, that wouldn't work very well.
I was thinking about putting one or two very small cameras inside the rift to get facial images and try (perhaps with the help of some photos taken beforehand) to paste the facial images into the texture mapped model.
Is there enough space or light inside the Rift for the cameras to work?
I realize this would probably be easier with a CAVE VR system, but that would of course be much more expensive, and I'd like to make something useful for normal people (if people who have a Kinect, Rift, and beefy GPU are normal).