One of our readers has been playing around with virtual reality lately, and has come up with a pretty cool beta run of his research — virtual interaction using your hands.
Using an Oculus Rift, the Leap Motion controller and a beta run of Unity 4.6, [Tomáš Mariančík] put together a test environment for physical interaction. The Leap Motion controller is capable of tracking your fingers with extremely high detail, which allows him to create a pair of virtual hands inside the test environment that almost perfectly mimic his movements. The hack here is making it all work together.
In the following demo he shows off by interacting with holographic menus, grabbing body parts off of anatomically correct human being (thanks to Unity3D), and manipulating his environment.
He admits the software isn’t quite polished yet, but was too excited to show off the concept to wait. We’re certainly excited to see what comes next — how about some haptic feedback gloves and some motion sensing sandals to allow you to walk around?
That motion control is much better than I expected. He was very quick with the buttons by the end of the video.
This disturblingly reminds me of surgeon simulator:)
Gorilla arm.
That’s the creepiest “anatomically correct human” I’ve seen before…
SpaceX has been using an Oculus Rift / Leap combination for a while now, as an aid for designing their Titanium 3D printed engines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNqs_S-zEBY
Man, I love the leap motion. Such a cool piece of kit, it’s a novelty sure, but it does a really, really good job at hand tracking. I just wish it gave a point cloud output, instead of finger positions in the API. Oh well.
Oh, the rift is cool too.