No more floating menus, joysticks in your hands, etc. Now, VR headset app developers will be able to place the entire interface right in the user’s palms.
Researcher Vimal Mollin from the American Carnegie Mellon University has developed a new way for a user to “communicate” with augmented or virtual reality gadgets. EgoTouch technology makes it possible to use human skin as a controller. EgoTouch is an interface that uses a camera in an AR or VR headset to read changes in the skin (the appearance of shadows, deformation). To create the technology, volunteers were invited, who, while being recorded on camera, “poked” the skin in different places with different intensities. As a result, enough data was collected, on which the system was trained to determine touches to the skin, the degree of intensity and duration. The result is an interface to which different functions can be “attached”, as in the case of touch control.
“For the first time, we have created a system that uses the camera that is already installed in all VR headsets. Our models do not require calibration and work straight out of the box. Now we can build on previous work on creating interfaces on the skin and make them real” – Vimal Mollin
