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Body location vs head/hmd location?

pjenness
Rising Star
My game includes first person VR standing view, which has got me thinking about see-ing your own body in view.

Is it possible at the moment , in particular with standing/room space to know where the body is ?

For example if the player were to bend and lean forward (eg examine a object on a table). Does the system know this is the movement, or is there no way to distinguish that movement to say, stepping forward and lowering.

Is this partly why most VR games dont show the body, just a portion of the arm/hand attached to a controller? As you cannot guarantee the body position, so can break immersion?

I have a system for kinnectV2 to determine body location, but there would only be a small portion of the user base that would have that hardware.
Would be nice if with touch there was also some sort of belt,  or something that gave extra tracking (for say body, leg etc).

That is one advantage rift might have over vive actually. Since Rift is sensing from the 2 cameras, an arbitrary number of additional markers could be added to detect and track. Where as vive is sensing from the headset, so every additional marker would need to be a sensor of some sort?

-P
4 REPLIES 4

kojack
MVP
MVP

pjenness said:

That is one advantage rift might have over vive actually. Since Rift is sensing from the 2 cameras, an arbitrary number of additional markers could be added to detect and track.



In theory. Although each LED needs to flash out an id number and there's a limited number of valid ids (not all codes can be used, for example numbers with a large number of off bits in a row would lag the tracking because it won't see the LED for a few updates).


Unfortunately head tracking alone can't tell you anything about body pose below the neck. You could guess, but getting it wrong would probably look worse than having no body. In games with a seated protagonist it's not so hard (flight sims, driving, etc), but in standing games there's just too many possible body poses for a given head position.

There's a few options:
- kinect 2 (slower update rate than rift, has trouble with feet and people facing away from the camera, but could work)
- perception neuron (full body mocap suit. Not very common and seems to have near zero support in games, but it works pretty well. Wireless and has up to 32 sensors on your body.
- Stem (if they ever release the damn thing. With 5 sensors you can do head, hands and feet (need head to sync rift tracking to stem tracking))


pjenness
Rising Star
Yeah
Problem is, all those third party ones ae not really worth developing for in terms of focusing on the main customer base. Since most customers wont own them,

Guess that is why most VR games just show the hands, and let your imagination fill in the blanks in regards to you r body?

-P

kojack
MVP
MVP
Yeah, sadly any body tracking is niche at the moment (even kinect 2, which is rare on PC).

Hands are all we can really track accurately at the moment. Even arms can't be guessed because the elbow could be at different positions and that will break immersion if it doesn't match what you feel. Leap Motion can help with this since it does track your forearms too.

Permethius
Honored Guest
It would be amazing if they had a light Velcro vest with waist, thigh & ankle sensors for the body that have heat, throb and shock, that you put on over your clothes to feel the attacks as they come for different areas of the body.