So we’ve been covering a lot of virtual reality tech here on Niche Gamer, most of the various devices seem to either be focused on your field of vision, or your physical movement (i.e. walking or aiming with a peripheral), but this hobbyist decided that simply viewing the game with a device strapped to your face wasn’t enough. He wanted his entire body in the game – and that’s exactly what he did.

Featured above, you’ll get to see Oliver Kreylos viewing both a virtual 3D environment – and himself, within the virtual 3D environment. This is made possible by three first genereation Kinect cameras that he positioned in a triangular formation, all of which are capturing a live feed to a singular Linux computer (with modest specs) that is adapting all of the raw footage to his Oculus Rift headset.

It has some bugs, but the implications are nearly endless. Kreylos goes a bit more into detail on how the entire process works:

I decided to embed the live 3D video into a virtual 3D model of an office, to show a possible setting for remote collaboration / tele-presence (more on that coming soon), and to contrast the “raw” nature of the 3D video with the much more polished look of the 3D model. One of the things we’ve noticed since we started working with 3D video to create “holographic” avatars many years ago was that, even with low-res and low-quality 3D video, the resulting avatars just feel real, in some sense even more real than higher-quality motion-captured avatars. I believe it’s related to the uncanny valley principle, in that fuzzy 3D video that moves in a very lifelike fashion is more believable to the brain than high-quality avatars that don’t quite move right.

You can read more about Kreylos and his pursuit of a real life holodeck over on his development blog.