Controlling a virtual city fly-through by optical tracking of inline-skaters

6. The show - conclusions

We built a system which enables three degrees of freedom tracking of inline-skaters and visualising a virtual city according to the movements of the skaters. We used speed and height information of the tracked skater as basic input data to adjust position and orientation of a fly-through camera in the city model. Basically the system is an open control-loop because the skater controls the fly-through by his movements on one hand, but has no response or input from the visualisation process on the other hand.

During the TV-show the algorithm worked well, but it turned out that the audience was not informed well to really see the connections between movements of the inline-skaters and the visualisations on the big screen behind the stage. As we asked several people right after the show, whether they saw any connections, some said that they did not notice anything while others understood what was going on.

The ideas lying behind the system introduced could be used as a starting point for interactive visualisations. One major improvement could be to track all 6 degrees of freedom and to create means by which the skater or any tracked person can directly interact with the visualisation process, i.e. this person is able to see the changes in visualisation which are due to his/her movements. This could be achieved by some kind of see through head mounted displays (HMD's). In this way it would be more likely that the audience would comprehend the connection between tracked person and the visualisation.

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