Real-Time Recognition of In-Place Body Actions and Head Gestures using Only a Head-Mounted Display

Body actions and head gestures are natural interfaces for interaction in virtual environments. Existing methods for in-place body action recognition often require hardware more than a head-mounted display (HMD), making body action interfaces difficult to be introduced to ordinary virtual reality (VR) users as they usually only possess an HMD. In addition, there lacks a unified solution to recognize in-place body actions and head gestures. This potentially hinders the exploration of the use of in-place body actions and head gestures for novel interaction experiences in virtual environments. We present a unified two-stream 1-D convolutional neural network (CNN) for recognition of body actions when a user performs walking-in-place (WIP) and for recognition of head gestures when a user stands still wearing only an HMD. Compared to previous approaches, our method does not require specialized hardware and/or additional tracking devices other than an HMD and can recognize a significantly larger number of body actions and head gestures than other existing methods. In total, ten in-place body actions and eight head gestures can be recognized with the proposed method, which makes this method a readily available body action interface (head gestures included) for interaction with virtual environments. We demonstrate one utility of the interface through a virtual locomotion task. Results show that the present body action interface is reliable in detecting body actions for the VR locomotion task but is physically demanding compared to a touch controller interface. The present body action interface is promising for new VR experiences and applications, especially for VR fitness applications where workouts are intended.