VR headset gives wearers 360-degree vision with just a small movement of the neck

A virtual reality system being developed which includes a head-mounted camera has made it possible for users to have 360-degree vision, making it possible to look directly behind yourself without twisting your entire body.
 

Ganesh Gowrishankar at the Montpellier Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics, and Microelectronics in France and his colleagues have developed a system that allows a user to see all the way around with just small neck movements.

The team added a 360-degree camera to the top of an HTC Vive Pro Eye headset, which can measure head rotation and display a portion of the panoramic video feed from the camera.

The researchers also added a layer of software that doubles the head rotation when selecting what part of the camera feed to show. This means that when the wearer turns their head 10 degrees, their field of view is rotated 20 degrees. When turning their neck 90 degrees to one side, they can see directly behind.

Gowrishankar says that test subjects adapted to how far they needed to rotate their head and where they needed to reach out with their hands to touch an object they saw – but they needed a similarly short period to re-adapt once they took the device off.

“It doesn’t overload your cognitive system. It provides you the agency to see where you want,” says Gowrishankar. “Surprisingly, it’s quite easy – you don’t get very surprised by it and you are able to just understand it very quickly, and adapt to it as well. So it seems to work very well from my perspective.”

 

Source: Inavate