Hands-free navigation in VR environments by tracking the head

Conventional methods of navigating within a virtual reality environment involve the use of interfaces such as keyboards, hand-held input devices such as joysticks, mice, and trackballs, and hand-worn data gloves. While these devices are mostly adequate, they are rather obstrusive and require some amount of training to use. Researchers have begun investigation into interfaces that have the capability to interpret human gestures visually. In this document, we describe an approach used to navigate virtual reality environments by tracking the pose (translation and orientation) of the user’s face. This “hands-free” navigation is simple, intuitive, and unobstrusive. It requires only commercially available products such as a camera and an image digitizer. The pose of the face is determined by warping a reference face image to minimize intensity difference between the warped reference face image and the current face image. This is more robust because all pixels in the face are used, in contrast to detecting only selected facial features. In addition, the proposed approach does not require a geometric model of the face. c Digital Equipment Corporation, 1997 This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of the Cambridge Research Laboratory of Digital Equipment Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributors to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproducing, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to the Cambridge Research Laboratory. All rights reserved. CRL Technical reports are available on the CRL’s web page at http://www.crl.research.digital.com. Digital Equipment Corporation Cambridge Research Laboratory One Kendall Square, Building 700 Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139