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DSCVR: designing a commodity hybrid virtual reality system

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Abstract

This paper presents the design considerations, specifications, and lessons learned while building DSCVR, a commodity hybrid reality environment. Consumer technology has enabled a reduced cost for both 3D tracking and screens, enabling a new means for the creation of immersive display environments. However, this technology also presents many challenges, which need to be designed for and around. We compare the DSCVR System to other existing VR environments to analyze the trade-offs being made.

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Notes

  1. Livingston et al. provide evaluations for the noise, accuracy, resolution, and latency of the skeleton-tracking software provided by Kinect (Livingston et al. 2012).

  2. Febretti et al. (2013) list the cost per megapixel as 14,000. However, dividing the listed cost by the listed megapixels gives a number of approximately $25,000. We have chosen to use the self-reported number in the paper for our analysis.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the support of the Living Environments Laboratory, the School of Human Ecology, the UW–Madison Graduate School and the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. We would specifically like to thank Vito Freese for his assistance with installation and Patricia Brennan, Kendra Kreutz, Andrew Wagner, John Hilgers, and Roberto Rengel for their support and assistance in this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, Room 3176, 330 N. Orchard Street, Madison, WI, 53715, USA

    Kevin Ponto

  2. Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, 330 N. Orchard Street, Madison, WI, 53715, USA

    Joe Kohlmann

  3. Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, Room 1144B, 330 N. Orchard Street, Madison, WI, 53715, USA

    Ross Tredinnick

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  1. Kevin Ponto
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Correspondence to Kevin Ponto.

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Ponto, K., Kohlmann, J. & Tredinnick, R. DSCVR: designing a commodity hybrid virtual reality system. Virtual Reality 19, 57–70 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-014-0254-0

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