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Virtual reality is making a very fast progress and has moved beyond just enjoying the immersive rich content. In order to make the whole VR experience more intuitive and interactive, tech giants are working towards teleporting users in the dream VR world by creating their own indigenous avatars. Moreover, new technologies like eye-tracking and facial recognition are all set to take your VR interactivity to the next level with the convenient maneuvering of in-VR controls.
Recently Facebook launched its social VR platform – Facebook Spaces – that lets users hang out with their friends in VR having different avatars of themselves. In order to make such a VR interaction more real-life, the C-Labs Research Division at Samsung has unveiled a new FaceSense concept which aims at making VR navigation more convenient by tracking movements on user’s face.
Image credit: YouTube
Samsung FaceSense
Samsung FaceSense aims at making our VR experience smooth and convenient in terms of navigation and controls. This project looks at capturing user’s facial expressions and then translating those in biometric signals which can be used for in-VR navigation.
Image credit: Tech Malak
Samsung writes: Whenever we speak, change our expression or shift our gaze, our faces generate electric signals. FaceSense recognizes and translates these biometric signals into input for navigation, allowing users to maneuver through VR worlds with intuitive movements and simple voice commands, rather than reaching for out-of-sight physical controls.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DR8J3yPmtg
Samsung showcased the first prototype for its FaceSense project last month at the VRLA 2017 conference and believes that FaceSense can set a benchmark and pave a path for future development of biometric technologies which allows for easy hands-free navigation. The prototype also showed simple voice command controls like ‘home’, ‘back’, ‘select’ and ‘cancel’.
Samsung is not the first however to work in this direction as there is another company called MindMaze who has developed a similar working module for facial expression conversion into in-VR controls. With such developments coming forward, we are soon to see interesting new applications coming ahead in VR.
cool. when would this be available commercially?
innovations everywhere! these tech giants are our main way to the future.
Getting this interesting new controls like expression controls and voice commands will deliver a even more intuitive VR experience