ThirdLight

Abstract

Figure 1: ThirdLight tracks the 3D position of low-cost photosensor markers embedded into arbitrary objects. In this example, a glove embedded with such sensors (circled red) is illuminated at high speed using a low-cost illumination device comprising multiple LEDs and Gray-code masks (circled green). The illumination device triangulates the 3D position of each marker at high speeds (333Hz). Each marker is uniquely identified and in this example used to reconstruct the pose of the user's hand. Our ThirdLight tracker is general purpose and can also be used to recover the pose of heads-up displays, props and controllers for virtual reality and robot manipulation scenarios. ABSTRACTWe present a low-cost 3D tracking system for virtual reality, gesture modeling, and robot manipulation applications which require fast and precise localization of headsets, data gloves, props, or controllers. Our system removes the need for cameras or projectors for sensing, and instead uses cheap LEDs and printed masks for illumination, and low-cost photosensitive markers. The illumination device transmits a spatiotemporal pattern as a series of binary Gray-code patterns. Multiple illumination devices can be combined to localize each marker in 3D at high speed (333Hz). Our method has strengths in accuracy, speed, cost, ambient performance, large working space (1m-5m) and robustness to noise compared with conventional techniques. We compare with a state-of-the-art instrumented glove and vision-based systems to demonstrate the accuracy, scalability, and robustness of our approach. We propose a fast and accurate method for hand gesture modeling using an inverse kinematics approach with the six photosensitive markers. We additionally propose a passive markers system and demonstrate various interaction scenarios as practical applications.