Project yourself in to virtual reality using three Xbox Kinects and a pair of Oculus Rifts

Witnessing virtual reality from a first-person perspective is one thing, but importing a digital copy of your physical body and simultaneously seeing it from a first- and third-person perspective is mind-boggling all together. Oliver Kreyolos merged footage from three Microsoft Xbox Kinects and synchronized the video feed into Facebook’s Oculus Rift headset to create a 3D representation of himself in virtual reality. The results are particularly paradoxical if two users swap their Rift headsets and see each other.

To create the image seen below, the three Kinects must be placed at 60° angles in relation to one another to form an equilateral triangle with the subject at the center. Although this records the subject from all angles, the software meshing the images together is still in a prototype stage and the results can be a tad glitchy and low resolution.

The manner in which Kreylos controls the camera allows him to see himself in both a first- and third-person perspective.

Kreylos states in his blog that the experience of seeing himself in three dimensions feels very real despite the low-quality image. “I believe it's related to the uncanny valley principle, in that fuzzy 3D video that moves in a very lifelike fashion is more believable to the brain than high-quality avatars that don't quite move right.”

The uncanny valley hypothesis dictates that artificial human movements found in robotics or 3D computer animation cause revulsion among human observers, but Kreylos’ representation may have been acceptable to his human mind because it is recorded from real-life footage rather manually animated with a skeleton and mesh, and thereby, a tad more realistic. 

The Kinect is a ripe tool for producing this effect because it records with a 3D camera, allowing it to fill in the missing depth details that a standard 2D camera lacks. Nevertheless, the iPhone’s camera can produce some pretty intense-looking 3D images using the parallax effect. Nifty perhaps, yes, but nowhere near as realistic as what the Kinect can do.

Via Doc-Ok.org