VRProp-net: real-time interaction with virtual props

Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR and AR) are two fast growing mediums, not only in the entertainment industry but also in health, education and engineering. A good VR or AR application seamlessly merges the real and virtual world, making the user feels fully immersed. Traditionally, a computer-generated object can be interacted with using controllers or hand gestures [HTC 2019; Microsoft 2019; Oculus 2019]. However, these motions can feel unnatural and do not accurately represent the motion of interacting with a real object. On the other hand, a physical object can be used to control the motion of a virtual object. At present, this can be done by tracking purely rigid motion using an external sensor [HTC 2019]. Alternatively, a sparse number of markers can be tracked, for example using a motion capture system, and the positions of these used to drive the motion of an underlying non-rigid model. However, this approach is sensitive to changes in marker position and occlusions and often involves costly non-standard hardware [Vicon 2019]. In addition, these approaches often require a virtual model to be manually sculpted and rigged which can be a time consuming process. Neural networks have been shown to be successful tools in computer vision, with several key methods using networks for tracking rigid and non-rigid motion in RGB images [Andrychowicz et al. 2018; Kanazawa et al. 2018; Pumarola et al. 2018]. While these methods show potential, they are limited to using multiple RGB cameras or large, costly amounts of labelled training data.