The Open Virtual Worlds team have been working away at combining the Oculus Rift, The Kinect and our ever expanding catalogue of historical reconstructions to allow users to travel back in time. By Taking the CtrlAltStudio Virtual World viewer, adding the kinect movement bindings developed for the Chimera project (integrated using the NuiLib API) users can stand freely in the centre of a room, wear the Oculus Rift headset, and control their movement without ever holding a peripheral. As the resulting viewer works with any Virtual World content this gives users access to all of our historic reconstructions (virtual time travel!) as well as all the content available across Second Life and all public OpenSim grids.
The viewer we have created is called the ACE viewer (for Armadillo Control Extensions). For details of how to download and run it go to its project page.
The controls for ACE have been kept as simple as possible. They were originally designed for the Caen Township installation in a museum. For that they had to be gestures that users could pick up almost instantly.
