With no shortage of ingenuity, 3D video expert Oliver Kreylos managed to transplant his entire body into a virtual reality environment using three Microsoft Kinects and an Oculus Rift. It’s a little fuzzy, but it’s easy to recognise what he’s really done. He’s created a Holodeck — or something close to it.
It makes perfect sense. Video from the three first generation Kinects create a 3D rendering of Kreylos’s body. That feed is then piped into a virtual world that he can see through his Oculus Rift headset. If he looks down, he can see his own body moving in real time. Kreylos says at one point in the video he made about the experience that he feels like he can actually reach out and touch the virtual objects — though of course, that’s not the case. That’s the last key feature for real holodeck technology, but in the meantime this is pretty good. It doesn’t even require a clunky backpack!
Now just imagine if you cranked up the resolution with the latest Kinect technology, or the latest Oculus Rift. You could build your own worlds and send a virtual version of yourself to live in them. It’s the Home of the Future, right inside your goggles. [Kotaku]