Head-mounted mixed reality projection display for games production and entertainment

Abstract

This research presents a mixed reality (MR) application that is designed to be usable during a motion capture shoot and supports actors with their task to perform. Through our application, we allow seeing and exploring a digital environment without occluding an actor's field of vision. A prototype was built by combining a retroreflective screen covering surrounding walls and a headband consisting of a laser scanning projector with a smartphone. Built-in sensors of a smartphone provide navigation capabilities in the digital world. The presented system was demonstrated in an initially published paper. Here, we extend these research results with our advances and discuss the potential use of our prototype in gaming and entertainment applications. To explore this potential use case, we built a gaming application using our MR prototype and tested it with 45 participants. In these tests, we use head movements as rather unconventional game controls. According to the performed user tests and their feedback, our prototype shows a potential to be used for gaming applications as well. Therefore, our MR prototype could become of special interest because the prototype is lightweight, allows for freedom of movement and is a low-cost, stand-alone mobile system. Moreover, the prototype also allows for 3D vision by mounting additional hardware.