Retargeting Virtual Worlds

The Problem

The proliferation of several HMDs and the VR experiences they bring with them promise to take us a step forward from being surrounded by a virtual world to presence, the feeling of actually being there. But while the user is ‘there’, he or she is actually here in the physical environment, navigating a way through obstacles.

The Solution

This project addressed the problem of presenting a VR experience to a user in the comfort of the living room by proposing a scheme to ‘retarget’ a virtual world to a given physical environment. Semantic relationships between objects are extracted from the virtual world. The retargeting aims to position the virtual world objects such that these semantic relationships are preserved and the match with the geometry of the physical environment is maximized. This retargeting scheme was successfully applied to retarget different virtual worlds to a real world physical environment.