Recent developments in game-based virtual reality educational laboratories using the Microsoft Kinect
Zhang, M., Zhang, Z., Chang, Y., E.-S. Aziz, Esche, S. K. & Chassapis, C.
Submitted for publication in Virtual Reality, 2016.
Abstract
Virtual Reality (VR) is a well-known concept and has been proven to be beneficial in various areas such as entertainment, research, military training, medical training, etc.
Also, many applications using VR technology in education have been reported. However, several disadvantages inherent in VR prevent its broad deployment in educational areas.
These limitations include non-realistic representation, lack of customizability and flexibility,financial feasibility, users’ physical and psychological discomforts, simulator sickness, etc.
In addition, the development of a VirtualEnvironment (VE) (including virtual space (VS), virtual models and avatars) that is suitable for educational usage could itself be troublesome.
For example, creating a VS by surveying the real world with traditional measuring tools or creating virtual features with CAD software involves many steps and thus is time-consuming and complicated.
The traditional data acquisition (DAQ) systems used in educational laboratories tend to be expensive, difficult to be set up and maintained.
Using conventional keyboard and mouse as input devicesfor VR applications could be unnatural sometime, while novel immersive VR devices such as 3-D glasses, motion-tracking gloves and haptic sensors are too expensive for educational institutions.
In this paper, an innovative method that uses the Microsoft Kinect as an essential component for developing game-based VR educational laboratories is presented.
This technique includes three different aspects.
First, it is an efficient method for creating the VE, the Kinect is used as a measuring tool for scanning the real laboratory scene and the real objects contained in it.
The acquired data then form the basis forcreating the 3-D VE. Second, the Kinect is employed as a substitute DAQ system for acquiring range data and trackingthe objects’ motion.
The acquired results are then used to animate the experiment inside the VR environment.
At last, the Kinect is used as a novel human-computer interface for tracking the users’ entire body motion and recognizing their voices.
The results from the motion tracking and voice recognition serve as commands for navigating inside the VR environment.
Using the methoddescribed here, three major aspectsof educational VR developmentcan be accomplished with an inexpensive and commercially available Kinect.