Static/Dynamic furniture/object tracker

[alandao]

What would this gadget do?

This gadget would create virtual representations of real furniture in your room.

The furniture that this gadget tracks would be split into two categories: Static objects which aren't moved around regularly (e.g. couches, desks, shelves) Dynamic objects which are moved around regularly (e.g. office chair, wireless keyboard, maybe a door?). Currently, dynamic objects would be tracked by Vive trackers

There should be a button to toggle display of the objects.

For extra milestones, it'd be nice if static/dynamic objects would "fade in" when the user is close to the edge of their play space. If a dynamic object is in the playspace, it should always be visible.

Who would use this gadget?

People who'd want to switch from standing to sitting or the reverse in VR without taking off the headset/looking through the nose-hole. People who'd want to type something on their wireless keyboard (or wired keyboard in a generally fixed position) without taking off the headset/looking through the nose-hole People who'd greedily want more playspace and feel confident that there's more playspace beyond the boundary (e.g. over a couch) People who'd want less reasons to take off their headset :)

Assuming that you're on the team, what other skillsets would you need to make this project happen over a couple days of hacking?

This project needs 3d assets, but there should be easy-to-find sample models of couches/desks/chairs.

What will be the toughest part of building this gadget?

The toughest part of this gadget would be representing dynamic objects appropriately depending on where the Vive Tracker is mounted. For example, the Vive tracker could be mounted to the back/left arm/right arm of an office chair.

[Adil3tr]

You might want to take a look at this, an attempt of this last year. Do you think people could make rough photographic models of their keyboards and line them up with passthough, then maintain position with the vive tracker like you said? It could also be used to anchor your in headset desktop view where your real monitor is when using passthrough AR, since the camera view of the monitor wouldn't be sufficient. A really interesting use case could be marking a static object like a chair or couch, then in a game you could mark an in game chair, and click an input to realign the playspace to align the in game chair with a real one. Something like that was made for Skyrim VR to increase immersion and allow casual presence.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1196450/Stop_Sign_VR/

[alandao]

Hey Adil3tr, I didn't know about Stop Sign VR. Glad to know there was a similar attempt at this. Although the use-case here is more about interacting with real life objects rather than avoiding them. I'll definitely take a look!

I don't see what could stop someone from creating models from photogrammetry/lidar and importing them into this gadget. Seems like it could be a cool idea.

The chair usecase seems interesting as well, although I don't think that'd need any additional functionality from the gadget. I'm used to playing Dirt Rally in VR, sitting in my chair, and recentering view, which sounds like what you're describing in Skyrim VR

[JoeLudwig]

Assuming we want dynamic objects, this will require Vive trackers. If we're ok with just static objects for the hackathon, we can drop that tag.

[alandao]

I think we're going for just static objects in the hackathon, so we can drop it for now

[Adil3tr]

That's probably reasonable, but it would be good for someone to make a dynamic object gadget at some point since someone using mouse and keyboard has controllers free, streamers have vive trackers in many cases, people can buy extra radios to use their old Vive wands as trackers, etc. Incidentally, I'm also surprised that no one has ever made a VR experience where one person wears the headset and two other people hold the controllers.