UNIVERSITÀ DI PISA
Facoltà di Scienze
Matematiche Fisiche e Naturali
C
ORSO DI
L
AUREA
M
AGISTRALE
IN
I
NFORMATICA
Tesi di Laurea
Exploring the Mixed Reality
capabilities of the HTC Vive
Candidato:
Davide Busato
Relatori:
Dott. Gianpaolo Palma Dott. Paolo Cignoni
Controrelatore:
Dott. Augusto Ciuffoletti
Acknowledgments
I would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the people who have assisted me in one way or another during this project. I will start by thanking my supervisor, Dr. Gianpaolo Palma, who was always avail-able to support me when I ran into trouble or had questions. Thanks also to Paolo Malomo and Manuele Sabbadin with whom I shared the room where I conducted the project for their useful comments and the many funny moments we had. I like to thank also to Prof. Paolo Cignoni and to the other professors of the courses I followed these years for the passion and motivation they put during their lectures and for inspiring me to explore computer graphics and many other CS topics too. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to my friends and my family for supporting me throughout writing this thesis and in my life in general.
Abstract
The study of this thesis deals with the exploration of the possibilities to provide an experience combining virtual and real elements when using one of the recent headset for virtual reality. The term used to describe the intertwining of elements coming from the two realities is Mixed Re-ality. The range of possible uses of this technology was largely untested until a few years ago, but the recent releases of many commodity de-vices for virtual and augmented reality have raised interesting ideas about the possibility of blending the virtual and physical world provid-ing a new type of experience to the user. My investigation was done using the HTC Vive, one of the high-end head mounted display of the moment, leveraging both the SDK made available by its producers and some software tools publicly available. The driving idea of the project was to use the front facing camera, which is directly mounted on the Vive, to provide a basis to do optical tracking of simple objects and gen-erate a 3D rendering correctly aligned with their real counterparts. To support this aim, tracking by feature detection approaches and camera calibration procedures have been used. Unfortunately, some technical difficulties during the various experiments hindered the achievement of good results and highlighted the limitation of the Vive in this type of en-deavor suggesting the use of more capable hardware to achieve a better integration of real and virtual worlds.
