VirtualBricks: Using LEGO to make objects for Virtual Reality

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10th Jan, 2019

VirtualBricks is a LEGO-based toolkit to enable easy, need-based construction of passive haptics for VR. It comprises of a set of modules that provide pose detection, novel single- axis manipulation input, and a range of other interactive functionalities. Modelled as LEGO bricks, these modules can be combined with simple LEGO bricks to create physical proxies for a variety of virtual objects, having different shapes and supporting different interactions — like a fishing rod or a slingshot. We developed a VR Integration software package to faciliate easy integration with Unity. This work was (conditionally) accepted at CHI 2019. Camera ready version can be found here.

 

bike-01
Building the virtual experience of riding a bike using VirtualBricks

 

 

comm-01
System Design

 

 

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Pose brick to provide position, orientation information
cad-03
Rotation brick to enable single-axis rotation manipulation
cad-01
Retraction brick to enable single-axis linear translation manipulation

 

 

Publication

Arora, J., Saini, A., Mehra, N., Jain, V., Shrey, S., Parnami, A. 2019. VirtualBricks: Exploring a Scalable, Modular toolkit for Enabling Physical Manipulation in VR. To appear in Proceedings of the ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Glasgow, Scotland, May 4 9, 2019). CHI 19. ACM, New York, NY.

Published by jatinarora07