Virtual reality (VR) technology is great as it helps create an immersive experience when you’re playing games or watching movies. However if there is one “downside”, it would be that the things you experience in VR aren’t replicated in real-life, meaning that when you’re flying in a VR game, you don’t really get the full experience of the wind in your hair and so on.
However it seems that the folks at Disney Research want to help bridge that gap by creating a motion capture system that lets you catch a ball in real-life, except that you’d have a VR headset strapped on. This is thanks to the use of various sensors to track your hand, head, and ball movements. After that motion prediction is applied to help visualize where the ball is moving.
So what’s the point of this software and technology? Basically it can be used in terms of training, where for example a game of catch could be simulated and made even easier thanks to combining VR technology and this predictive software, thus reducing the amount of time players have to spend doing trial and error.
This could lead to games being considerably more immersive than they already are, or creating all kinds of training simulations where it will combine real-life and technology at the same time, thus giving users a bit more understanding of how it might work in real situations.