Blending Virtual Environments with Physical Reality via Geometric Compositing
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Solution Overview
Problem
Virtual reality technologies isolate users from their physical environment, limiting awareness and safety by restricting the view of real-world surroundings while immersed in virtual environments, posing hazards from unseen physical objects.
Innovation Solution
A system that dynamically blends geometric representations of physical objects detected in the environment with virtual environments using sensor data, allowing for selective compositing and pass-through image data to maintain awareness of the physical environment while immersed.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If virtual reality technology provides fully-immersive virtual environments, then user immersion and virtual experience quality are improved, but user awareness and safety in the physical environment deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges the virtual environment with the physical environment by compositing geometric representations of real-world objects into the virtual scene. This allows users to remain immersed in the virtual environment while simultaneously perceiving physical objects that could pose safety hazards, thus combining the benefits of both fully-immersive VR and physical awareness.
Solution Approach 2:
The system introduces an intermediary layer of geometric representations that mediate between the virtual environment and the physical world. These computer-generated representations act as a bridge, conveying information about physical objects to the user without breaking the immersive virtual experience, thereby solving the contradiction between immersion and safety.
2Reliability
If the user's view of the physical environment is restricted for full immersion, then virtual experience quality is improved, but perception of physical objects deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system creates accurate geometric copies (representations) of physical objects detected by sensors and composites them into the virtual environment. These copies preserve the essential spatial and visual information about physical objects, allowing users to perceive physical environment information without directly viewing the physical world, thus maintaining virtual experience quality while preventing information loss.
3Object-affected harmful factors
If geometric representations of physical objects are blended with virtual environment, then user safety is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system employs a multi-functional approach where a single computing device performs multiple tasks: capturing sensor data from the physical environment, generating geometric representations, compositing them with the virtual environment, and rendering the blended scene for display. This universal system handles both virtual reality processing and physical environment monitoring within one integrated platform, managing complexity through consolidation rather than multiplication of components.
Data Source
AI summary
Various embodiments are provided herein for tracking a user's physical environment, to facilitate on-the-fly blending of a virtual environment with detected aspects of the physical environment. Embodiments can be employed to facilitate virtual roaming by compositing virtual representations of detected physical objects into virtual environments. A computing device coupled to a HMD can select portions of a depth map generated based on the user's physical environment, to generate virtual objects that correspond to the selected portions. The computing device can composite the generated virtual objects into an existing virtual environment, such that the user can traverse the virtual environment while remaining aware of their physical environment. Among other things, the computing device can employ various blending techniques for compositing, and further provide image pass-through techniques for selective viewing of the physical environment while remaining fully-immersed in virtual reality.