Mitch Kapor unveils SL navigation via 3D camera

Fri Apr 11, 2008 1:06pm PDT

By Adam Reuters

Linden Lab Chairman Mitch Kapor just sent over a video for a project that he first disclosed to Reuters in Davos: Hands Free 3D, a novel way of navigating Second Life using only your own body movements and a 3D camera.

The video sums it up best:

The prototype works a bit like a Segway: Lean forward, and your avatar walks forward, lean to the side and your avatar turns. Perhaps inevitably, the person acting out these movements doesn’t look too suave, any more than someone playing Wii Tennis in their living room looks like Roger Federer.

However, Kapor and his colleague Philippe Bossut have come up with an elegant way to control flight: lift your hands above your shoulders to take off, and then swoop your arms right and left like you’re an 8-year-old playing ‘airplane.’ There are also ways to take off and land; Mitch even cracks a Matrix joke about how “nobody makes the first jump.”

Don’t expect to have this set-up in your living room tomorrow, as the camera from 3dvsystems isn’t on sale yet. The project is being done under the auspices of Kapor Enterprises Inc, run by Mitch and his wife Freada, rather than Linden Lab.

“For the moment, our objective is to explore the possibilities for these new types of devices,” Kapor and Bossut wrote on their website. “We believe that these cameras will eventually make interacting with Virtual Worlds as comfortable as using a webcam. This will ultimately broaden the appeal of Virtual Worlds by allowing new ways of online expression. It may also attract people who find the current gaming interface too hard to handle.”