Virtual Interior Design

Latest Kinect hack - a virtual reality interior designer that lets you try ...

When that's done, you can view the furniture in 3D using an iPad application. Moving it around simply requires a wave of your hand.

The Virtual Interior Design technology is the result of a 13-week physical computing course that encouraged students to develop ways for people to interact with technology.

“The kind of interaction type was loosely based on the Minority Report style of technology where you move your hand and you’re controlling the interface without actually having to touch anything,” Garett Heel, one of the students involved in the design, told news.com.au.

“That style of interaction with the computer I think is inspired by all those kinds of movies.”

Dr Stephen Viller, information and communication technology lecturer at the University of Queensland, told news.com.au that the team saw the technology being designed for retail furniture stores.

“You bring in a plan of your living room for example, that gets loaded into the system and then you can kind of pick items from the catalogue, move them into the virtual space, rearrange them as you want to and then see what this would look like in your own house," Dr Viller said.

The technology combines an infrared glove coupled with an iPod touch, an iPad and a Kinect to allow users to visualise the room.

When users make a fist, a switch on the glove causes light to be transmitted. The light is tracked via the Kinect which is mounted next to a projector that throws the image into an open space in the room.

An application called Action Script tracks the motion of the user, allowing them to rotate and move the position of the products with hand gestures.

Once the users have found the perfect spot for their furniture in the virtual space, they tap a “view in 3D” link on the iPod touch which generates unique markers or augmented reality codes for each piece of furniture.

The iPad picks up the code using its camera and displays 3D models of the furniture on the screen using an application called ARToolkit.

Group member Ankith Konda said that in time they hoped to develop the technology so users could take an image of the room they’re shopping for and upload it into the system to allow them to get a better idea of colour schemes and aesthetic.

“That was actually one of our initial considerations," Mr Konda said.

“When we were thinking about the concept, one of them was for people to be able to take pictures of their living room, bring it in and also put in different features like their wall colours or carpet colours and such.