An Indoor Navigation System for Live-Action Virtual Reality Games

Recent popularization of HMD devices (such as the Oculus Rift, Samsung VR, and the HTC Vive) has shed light into mitigating traditional restrictions of high end devices, bringing attention again to virtual reality and novel possibilities for games and entertainment applications. The advancement of virtual reality technologies and context-awareness give rise to new game genres such as "live-action virtual reality games", which we proposed in previous works. Live-action virtual reality games create a kind of "augmented virtuality" – a mixed-reality where the virtual world is augmented with real-world information. In these games, players wear HMD devices and see a virtual world that is constructed using the physical world architecture as the basic geometry and context information. Physical objects that reside in the physical world are also mapped to virtual elements. Live-action virtual reality games keep the virtual and real-worlds superimposed, requiring players to physically move in the environment and to use different interaction paradigms (such as tangible & embodied interaction) to complete game activities. This setup enables the players to touch physical architectural elements (such as walls) and other objects, "feeling" the mixed-reality environment. We propose an architecture that implements a low cost system for live-action virtual reality games that addresses indoor navigation and tracking of physical elements, providing good results due to its accuracy. The system is based on infrared markers, enabling it to operate in the spectral infrared region to work with low optical noise and better precision when compared to solutions based on fiducial markers. Furthermore, this paper describes our system and presents two case studies based on our architecture.