TurkDeck: Physical Virtual Reality Based on People

Lung-Pan Cheng, Thijs Roumen, Hannes Rantzsch, Sven Köhler, Patrick Schmidt, Robert Kovacs, Johannes Jasper, Jonas Kemper, and Patrick Baudisch


In Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology (UIST'15)
full paper: ACM digital library



TurkDeck is an immersive virtual reality system that repro- duces not only what users see and hear, but also what users feel. TurkDeck produces the haptic sensation using props, i.e., when users touch or manipulate an object in the virtual world, they simultaneously also touch or manipulate a corresponding object in the physical world. Unlike previ- ous work on prop-based virtual reality, however, TurkDeck creates these physical representations on the fly by making a group of human workers present and operate the props only when and where the user can actually reach them.



The instruction interface: Human Actuators see projections on the floor with their number and shape of the board. They are informed about a new instruction using audio. The player is protected from this audio using noise cancelling headphones which play the game sounds to improve immersion


The boards are a generic prop and can be arranged in a large variety of shapes


ACM reference:
Lung-Pan Cheng, Thijs Roumen, Hannes Rantzsch, Sven Köhler, Patrick Schmidt, Robert Kovacs, Johannes Jasper, Jonas Kemper, and Patrick Baudisch. 2015. TurkDeck: Physical Virtual Reality Based on People. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology (UIST '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 417-426. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2807442.2807463

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