Wireless Kinect Sensor Network System for Virtual Reality Applications

Abstract

Currently, Microsoft Kinect, a motion sensing input device, has been developed quickly in research for human gesture recognition. The Kinect integrating into games and Virtual Reality (VR) improves the immersion sense and natural user experience. However, the Kinect is able to accurately measure a user within five meters, while the user must face to the sensor. To solve this problem, this paper develops a wireless Kinect sensor network system to detect users at several viewports. This system utilizes multiple Kinect clients to sense user's gesture information, which is transmitted to a VR managing server for the integration of the distributed sensing datasets. Different from the VR application with a single Kinect, our proposed system is able to support the user's walking around no matter whether he is facing the sensors or not. Meanwhile, we developed a virtual boxing VR game with two Kinects, Samsung Gear VR and Unity3D environment, which verified the effective performance of the proposed system.