MARVIN: A Mobile Automatic Realtime Visual and INertial tracking system

Six-sided fully-enclosed projective displays present complex and novel problems for tracking systems. The fully-enclosed nature of these displays limits the use of existing tracking technologies which typically require a tether or a line-of-sight to the user which is unavailable in this context. This thesis presents a hybrid Inertial/Optical tracking system for fully-enclosed projective displays. The inertial system uses linear acceleration measurements to estimate relative head motion but the estimate is subject to drift due to sensor misalignment and calibration errors. To compensate for this drift, a vision-based tracking technology is used to estimate the absolute pose of the operator's head. The optical tracking technology relies on the operator wearing a set of laser diodes arranged in a specific configuration and then tracking the projection of these lasers on the external walls of the immersive display. This approach places minimal hardware on the user and no visible tracking equipment is placed within the immersive environment. The inertial and vision-based pose estimates may be combined via a recursive least-squares filter to provide the pose of the operator.