Traces: Wireless full body tracking in the CAVE

Abstract

"Traces" is an immersive art project which uses the CAVE stereo-immersive environment for an unorthodox purpose. While most virtual worlds are based on a paradigm of virtual navigation through texture mapped worlds, Traces has no "world" and no navigation. The aesthetic/theoretical goal of Traces is to focus the attention of the user onto their sense their own of embodiment through time. The bodily behavior of the user generates real-time graphics and sound. The technical goal of Traces is wireless full body interaction without the use of standard trackers, joysticks and wands, and without icons, menus or graphical pointers of any kind. To achieve these goals, we have built an infra-red multi-camera machine-vision system which constructs a volumetric body model of the user in real time. We use this body model data to perform all sensing functions in the CAVE. It controls all graphical and sound events, it replaces the wand or joystick for control, it replaces trackers and supplies tracking data. The vision system developed for the Traces project is notable both for its speed and accuracy, and for the fact that it uses inexpensive,
off-the-shelf hardware. Traces was developed off-line at CMU, ZKM and elsewhere in the fall of 1998 and the spring of 1999, and was integrated in the CAVE at Institute for Media Communication, Sankt Augustin, Germany, during the summer of '99. Traces won first prize in the Cyberstar98 competition, sponsored by WDR and GMD, Germany. Traces was premiered at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria September 4-9, 1999.