Immersive virtual aquarium with real-walking navigation

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new immersive virtual aquarium system that comprises enhanced navigation, shared user experience, and manipulation in virtual reality. The system utilizes a large studio that allows users to walk around naturally and operates as a surrogate for navigation in the virtual aquarium. It also provides an additional view that shows what is happening in the virtual aquarium to observers. The system can be regarded as a form of augmented virtuality as it superimposes a live video avatar of users into the virtual aquarium. In addition, each user can interact with virtual fishes via 3D gestures because the system also utilizes a gesture recognition method that is suitable for the physically large space. These features enable our proposed system to give users and observers a more immersive and novel experience than conventional virtual reality systems.

A survey of real locomotion techniques for immersive virtual reality applications on head-mounted displays

“…Potted Although unmediated real locomotion is more often used for 58 VR experiments, it can also be used for real-world applications. 59 An excellent example is the work by Jung et al [18], where a 60 motion-capture studio of 10 x 10 m 2 with a trackable region of 61 7 x 7 m 2 is "transformed" into a virtual aquarium where users 62 can freely explore the underwater environment.…”

Virtual Reality and Oceanography: Overview, Applications, and Perspective

“…Onshore, VR has been used to render educational underwater scenes for the benefit of students and the general public, offering interactive access to underwater ocean ecosystems and dynamics via CAVEs and HMDs (Frohlich, 2000;Chen et al, 2012;Jung et al, 2013). Submersible AR and VR applications are a more recent development, and various projects have made use of waterproof hardware to create experiences which combine swimming with animation and actual underwater images (Bellarbi et al, 2013;Oppermann et al, 2016;Costa et al, 2017).…”

Underwater Mixed Environments

“…In the literature there are several examples for virtual underwater worlds designed for entertainment or education: Virtual Oceanarium [28], the SAP -Swimming Across the Pacific installation [17], the Virtual Exploration of Underwater Sites [16], [33] or the immersive virtual aquarium installation [40]. They all present a virtual underwater world that can be explored with typical VR interaction.…”