KAVE: Building Kinect Based CAVE Automatic Virtual Environments, Methods for Surround- Screen Projection Management, Motion Parallax and Full-Body Interaction Support.

While CAVE Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVE) have been around for over 2 decades they remain complex to setup, unaffordable to most, and generally limited to data and model visualization applications for academia and industry. In this paper, we present a solution to create a monocular CAVE using the Unity 3D game engine by adding motion parallax and full-body interaction support via the use of a Kinect V2 low-cost sensor. More importantly, we provide a functional and easy to use plugin for that effect, the KAVE, and its configuration tool. Here, we describe our own low-cost CAVE setup, a range of alternative configurations to CAVE systems using this technology and example applications. Finally, we discuss the potential of such an approach considering the current advancements in VR and gaming.

The KAVE is a set of prefabs and scripts that use the Kinect V2 to add parallax effect to unity projects and also full body tracking for interaction with virtual objects. The parallax effect happens when you move your head relative to the screen and the image reacts as if you are looking through a window to a virtual world or something is popping out from the screen, parallax effect is one of several visual cues that the human brain uses to perceive depth. In practice, virtual objects that are beyond the screen/projection plane will move in the opposite direction than the head, objects that are closer than the screen will move in the same direction, this effect makes it look as if the user is in the virtual environment. To create this effect the system needs to know where the screens or projection surfaces (in case you are using projectors) and the Kinect are located in space, so that it knows the position of the user head relative to the screens. The KAVE also uses the Kinect to provide full body tracking in form of a 25 joints skeleton that can collide with other virtual objects.

Available at the Unity Store: 

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/camera/kave-113090

Summary:
*Add parallax effect to Unity projects through Kinect head tracking
*Support up to 8 screens/projectors in any physical configuration (normal desktop screen, CAVE, etc...)
*Feature full skeleton tracking for interaction with virtual objects
The plugin requires a calibration file with the position, orientation and size of the screens, projectors, projection surfaces and Kinect sensor. For this you can use our calibration software: KAVECalibrator.rar

Requirements:

*The Kinect SDK must be installed: Kinect for Windows SDK 2.0*The official Kinect2 unity package must be added to the project, extract "Kinect.2.0.1410.19000.unitypackage" from "Unity Pro packages", download atKinect for Windows homepage, download Unity Pro packages.
More information can be found in the research paper and development repository.

Reference:

Afonso Gonçalves, Sergi Bermúdez i Badia. (2018). KAVE: Building Kinect Based CAVE Automatic Virtual Environments, Methods for Surround- Screen Projection Management, Motion Parallax and Full-Body Interaction Support. In PACM on Human-Computer Interaction (Vol. 2, p. EICS). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3229092 CITE DOWNLOAD