How to use Riftcat VRIdge with Kinects: ImmotionRoom Iridge server

A lot of time ago I described you how cool is VRIdge, the solution that makes you play SteamVR games using a cheap Cardboard or GearVR headset. I love VRidge, not only because it allows people to lower the entry point for playing VR experiences (a Cardboard is surely cheaper than a Vive), but also because it is made by very kind people (I’ve interacted with them and I can assure you that these Polish guys&girls are really fantastic).

Some times ago I wrote a tutorial on how to use VRIdge with Kinect and it got its success. Reason is that of course Cardboads can’t offer the positional tracking owned by Vive, so VRIdge users can supply it with other sensors, like Kinects for instance. Tutorial highlighted some issues in this process, since it required some dev skills (one of the required program doesn’t work on standalone, but needs to be run inside Eclipse!) and it used very rough programs. Since we at Immotionar work with Kinect and VR from almost three years, me and Gianni asked ourselves: why can’t we fix this issue? And we did it.

Me, doing funny things with a 3-kinects setup

Now you can use VRIdge with Kinect using ImmotionRoom solution, in particular using its Iridge server. What are advantages of this solution?

Oculus Tracker Update 1.12 makes Oculus a good guy again

After having criticized Oculus about its tracking issues and how its updates were making things even worse (unless you used Duct Tape, of course… duct tape fixes everything!), today I have to say “Bravo!” to its guys.

The new Update they’ve released for the Rift, the 1.12, seems to have fixed lots of stuff: as you can see from the release notes, a lot of work has been done to make tracking good again. The feedbacks from the users have been really positive and now reddit shows people writing “With 1.12 my room scale works” and so the virtual world is a happier place. Surely there will be people that will still experience errors and problems, but their number has been drastically lowered.

Oculus Touch tracking problems… it’s all USB fault? And will they be fixed?

Since their announcement, Oculus Touch have gathered lots of attentions and positive reviews. I’ve tried them and reviewed them (here and here, and even talked about their SDK here) and I agree that they’re great.

But lots of users are having lots of issues: unstable tracking, room scale not working and so on. It seems that Oculus answer to Vive room-scale has not been that good. I and lots of other users have not had any issues, but on reddit every day tons of users say that they’re having problems: Touch drifting, losing tracking… this kind of stuff.

Full body VR game Hit Motion is out now!

At Immotionar, we’ve just made a great announcement that I want to share with you all! We’ve released Hit Motion, a game that we’ve been developing in the last weeks with some local indies: the game designer Massimiliano Ariani and 3D artist Victor Pukhov.

Hit Motion awesome logo

Hit Motion is in pre-alpha, so it is still not a complete game, but it’s already fun because using the ImmotionRoom system, it lets you use the full body to run from one side of your room to the other kicking and puching every thing that comes in your virtual sight! This is Max while playing with it… isn’t he funny?

The game is compatible with every headset (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Razer HDK, Gear VR, Google VR) and with every supported sensor (at the moment Kinect v1 and Kinect v2), so if you have at least a Kinect (but the more you have, the better 😉 ) and a VR headset, download it for free on Immotionar website!

How to use Kinect with HTC Vive

When I talk about the full body virtual reality system ImmotionRoom that we’re developing at Immotionar, the first question that people asks me is always “Why Kinect? Kinect is dead”. I’ve already answered to this question, explaining that yes, it is slowly dying, but Kinect is still the best off-the-shelf infrared body-tracking sensor that we can find on the market (due to the mega-training samples fed to its algorithm). So, while we hope that other competitors like Orbbec and VicoVR will reach its quality level, we have still to use it… and this is the same reason why lots of research projects still employ the kinect.

But then there is another important question people make me: “I’m a Vive user… and Vive and Kinect interfere a lot. I like your videos about full body virtual reality, but I will surely not be able to use it…”

Well, let’s be honest: this is true.

Leap Motion goes mobile

With a post written on its blog, Leap Motion has made a huge announcement: Leap Motion will go mobile.

This should not sound as something completely new: Leap Motion already had some kind of Android SDK and some kind of mount that you could use with Cardboard.

DODOcase advanced Cardboard viewer: as you can see, there is a strange Leap Motion mount in front of it (image credits: Road To VR)

The problem of this solutions was that they were far from being complete: you had somehow to connect a PC-dedicated device to the USB port of your smartphone and somehow mount it on your headset. In some cases, like with my Gear VR innovator edition (with no external USB ports), you were unable to use Leap Motion at all.

The difference between Kinect v2 and v1

Yesterday we of Immotionar have announced the support of Kinect v1 for our full-body virtual reality system. To implement it, I had to work with this sensor, after more than 2 years of work with only the v2 version. A curious fact is that i had never worked with Kinect v1 before, I started directly with the v2… so I made the path in the reverse way of all other people. But… how are this sensors different?

Well, first of all if you look at them, Kinect v2 seems a more refined version of Kinect v1, but its defect is that it is bigger and has lots of annoying cables and power converters, while Kinect v1 is surely more lightweight and easy to carry and to install.

About technical specifications, this chart found on the great blog Zugara is a good resumée:

A great comparison chart of the difference between the two Kinects. The only missing thing is that both Kinects now are fully working on Windows 10 (Image by Zugara)

Is Kinect dead?

At Immotionar, we try to give full body avatar to the user using external sensors. At the moment we use Microsoft Kinect v2 for our prototype and the question that all people ask us is:

Why do you use Kinect, if Kinect is dead?

Well, I’m actually getting bored of answering this question… and that’s why I’m writing this post to provide a complete answer to it. And being Halloween, talking about dead things is the right topic for today 😉

So, is Kinect dead?

During the nights of full moon, you can see the ghost of a 3-legs Kinect in the forest

Well, the answer is not so easy.

HTC Vive 2 will cost less than the first version?

Some days ago I read a super interesting article on RoadToVR: it was about a new kind of sensors that could reduce the overall cost of Lighthouse technology of the HTC Vive. You can find it here.

I published the article on reddit, where it gained a lot of interest… 466 karma points! W00t! A record for me! But why is this so important? And what are we talking about?