The subject of the project is to develop a free-standing, built-up VR projection system permanently connected with goggles, with six degrees of freedom, designed for unattended work in public facilities and adapted to be operated by untrained users, including people with specific disabilities. The system will ensure, assuming the use of limited space and the elimination of dedicated hand manipulators used in VR systems and special treadmills, mats or other leg movement transmission systems, mapping the movement in a larger real space (even thousands of square meters) without the need to physically move around it and analogous movement of the goggles (space scaling).
The project was divided into 5 stages. Industrial research will be carried out in stages 1 and 2, experimental development works in stages 3 and 4, and pre-implementation works in stage 5.
The stage 1 provides for the acquisition of new skills in the field of mapping real space into virtual space, so that moving in real space requires a limited range of movements and / or signals sent by manipulators compared to the current state of the art. Unique algorithms will be developed – programming elements of the V system.
As part of stage 2, works involving the creation of components of complex systems, i.e. a mechatronic system, which is a hardware platform of the VR system, were planned. The work will include building a prototype in a laboratory environment, followed by internal testing.
The essence of stage 3 will be to acquire new goggles installation skills and their integration with an IT tool so that their use by an untrained user is just as easy and provides at least the same functionalities as in the case of non-built goggles, and additionally allows their use without the need to move on a real surface similar to a virtual one and without the need for additional controllers.
The subject of the work of the 4th stage will be to conduct an experiment to compare the device to the existing ones on the market (goggles + controller) in terms of selected psychological, physiological and ergonomic variables. These works are to solve the research problem, which is the verification of the following research hypotheses.
The pre-implementation works will consist in the implementation of market analysis, including, among others: assessment of its size, taking into account the budgets of individual institutions and the number of visitors, and an assessment of the degree of demand for the so-called additional services (in our case, VR content creation services).
