How to use VRidge with Kinect

Yesterday I’ve told you what VRidge is and wrote a review about this cool product that lets you use virtual reality PC experiences with your Cardboard mobile headset.

Today I want to focus on one of its features: the ability to use a Microsoft Kinect to emulate positional tracking of the headset: this way you can have what mobile headsets really lack, that is the positional tracking, the room-scale functionality. The system works in a very simple manner: they use the head position detected by the Kinect as the position of the headset in the virtual world, in a way very similar to what we do in our ImmotionRoom solution. But how to make it work? And is it really working well? I’ll try to answer these questions in this article.

UPDATE: I’ve written a new article that offers a more elegant way of using VRidge with Kinect using ImmotionRoom system. You can find it here. Otherwise, go on to keep reading on how to use the standard way involving opensource software like OpenTrack.

What is VRidge and how to use it

Today I tried VRidge. VRidge is a cool software that lets you use your Cardboard to play virtual reality PC games for Oculus and Vive. The premises were just too awesome that I had to try it, so I spent some time trying to figure out how it works. VRidge just installs DLLs, drivers and stuff, so that when you launch your PC virtual reality game, it thinks that the required headset is attached. Instead, the service just streams all sensors data (gyroscopes and stuff) from the phone to the PC game and all visuals data (the images to show to the user) from the PC game to the phone screen.

Will Alloy change virtual reality?

Today I went on reddit, to find the front page full of news about this new marvelous piece of tech: Intel Alloy.