An Efficient Method for Creating Virtual Spaces for Virtual Reality

A virtual space (VS) is an indispensable component of a virtual environment (VE) in virtual reality (VR). Usually, it is created using general tools and skills that are independent of the users’ specific applications and intents. Creating a VS by surveying the real world with traditional measuring tools or creating virtual features with CAD software involves many steps and thus is time consuming and complicated. This renders the construction of VEs difficult, impairs their flexibility and hampers their widespread usage. In this paper, an efficient method for creating VSs with a handheld camera is introduced. In this approach, the camera is used as a measuring tool that scans the real scene and obtains the corresponding surface information. This information is then used to generate a virtual 3D model through a series of data processing procedures. Firstly, the camera’s pose is traced in order to locate the points of the scene’s surface, whereby these surface points form a point cloud. Then, this point cloud is meshed and the mesh elements are textured automatically one by one. Unfortunately, the virtual 3D model resulting from this procedure represents an impenetrable solid and thus collision detection would prevent the avatars from entering into this VS. Therefore, an approach for eliminating this restriction is proposed here. Finally, a game-based virtual laboratory (GBVL) for an undergraduate mechanical engineering class was developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methodology. The model format used in Garry’s Mod (GMod) is also found in other VEs, and therefore the method proposed here can be straightforwardly generalized to other VE implementations.