91av

You could soon be playing virtual reality games on the bus, thanks to a headset that translates the twitching of your fingers into much larger body movements in the virtual world.

VR headsets normally require a large space to use safely, because the games they run tend to require gesticulating and other large physical motion. “The problem is that you might not be able to use whole-body gestures everywhere. Imagine you’re on public transport, you might hit someone,” says at Télécom Paris, a university in France.

So Tseng and his colleagues have created software called FingerMapper to avoid VR users banging their hands into objects or other people when using headsets in public.

It runs on Oculus Quest VR headsets, which have cameras that allow software to identify and track the wearer’s limbs. FingerMapper enables the headset to map the motion of a user’s index fingers to the corresponding arm in virtual reality, shrinking the amount of space needed in the real world.

Tseng says the system is surprisingly easy to get used to, but that actions like making a clenched fist can’t translate directly to VR because the detected movement of your real fingers is being used to control virtual arms instead. To address this, the team made it so users can twitch their thumbs to activate their virtual grasp.

“The idea is that we see in the future, probably in 10 years, that people can wear these head-mounted displays everywhere,” says Tseng. Your actions won’t be as precise or as expressive as if you were using your whole body to control your virtual movements, “but it still works when you’re doing the commute”, he says.

Using FingerMapper in public is likely to attract strange looks for now, but this will change over time, just as seeing someone browsing on a smartphone has gone from being weird to being an expected part of life, says Tseng.