AnArU, a virtual reality framework for physical human interactions

Abstract

Virtual Reality has become, once again, a popular and interesting topic, both as a research and commercial field. This trend has its origin in the use of mobile devices as computational core and displays for Virtual Reality. Android is one of the most used platform in this context and Unity3d is a suitable game engine for such platform. In order to improve the immersive experience, some electronic devices, Arduino especially, are used to gather information, such as the movement of the user’s arms or legs. Although Android, Arduino and Unity3d are often used independently in Virtual Reality investigations, few studies use all of them together. Furthermore, each time these technologies are used in a new project, the developers have to think about a new way of communication between them. In this work we present AnArU, a framework for physical human interaction in Virtual Reality. The goal of AnArU is to allow an easy, efficient and extensible communication between the hardware and software involved in the Virtual Reality System.