The Depth Light

PubDate: August 2018

Teams: University of of Mississippi

Writers: McKennon McMillian; Hunter Finney; Jonathan Hopper; J. Adam Jones

PDF: The Depth Light

Abstract

The Depth Light solves the problem of not being able to view the real world, without having to remove the Head Mounted Display, accurately and easily. The Depth Light is activated by a button or trigger press on an HTC Vive controller and consists of a Vive controller, an ultrasonic depth finder, a microcontroller (to send measured distances over serial), a web camera, and a mount for the microcontroller and camera. The device works by finding the distance between the device and the nearest real-world object, taking a sum of these distances, and sending this over serial to a computer as an average. In Unity3D, an object is rendered at the distance sent from the micro controller. This object is then textured with the video feed from the web camera. This object’s distance changes in the virtual environment in real time as the Depth Lights micro controller sends new information. As the distance changes the scale of the object also changes, this is to keep the object the same size in the field of vision. The data from the Depth Light is handled by a Unity3D plugin. This plug-in handles all the rendering commands and all of the scaling.