The topic of the course that this project was for was “Virtual Environments” that was in the Spring 2011.

The goal of the project, that we worked on over the course of the semester, was to have two different individuals use a HMD and a Microsoft Kinect to share the same virtual environment and be able to interact with that environment simultaneously.

The project’s paper is available here.

In this project, we used the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST) to interface with the Microsoft Kinect and stream the joint positions of the Kinect user. We used a NVIS nVisor ST-60 Head-Mounted Display with a World Viz Precision Point Tracking system that WorldViz develops to be used with Vizard to display the virtual environment.

The Garden Maze is shown with the Green Arrow showing the start location, the Red Square representing the Kinect finish location, and the Blue Square representing the HMD finish location.

With the invention of the PrimeSense Sensor and its use in the Microsoft Kinect, there have been many different projects that solve or explore interesting areas of natural interaction with computers. We chose the area of telepresence because telecommunication is a very open area for creative solutions and with the invention of the Microsoft Kinect, telepresence will only become more prevalent.