Correcting User's Head and Body Orientation Using a Comfort Pose Function

The use of inertial sensors for tracking is becoming common in the development of VR applications due to their low-cost, high quality and availability. However, even if they are very sensitive and precise, inertial sensors work with incremental information, easily introducing errors in the system. The most important is that head tracking both in head mounted displays (HMD) and other systems based on inertial sensors suffer from drifting. In this paper we present some important limitations that still prevent the wide use of sensors like a single Kinect for full body tracking in immersive VR systems. Inevitably, to compensate for the drifting, the user moves away from the suitable pose in front of the Kinect, being a restrictive limitation for this kind of tracking. In this work we introduce a software solution for this problem and evaluate it experimentally. Results show that our comfortable pose function is effective on eliminating drifting. The efficiency and accuracy of this method makes it suitable for a number of applications in immersive VR.