Ideal sensor and hardware for body tracking game?

Nuitrack SDK
1

I’m working on a project of a game that recognizes the player movement as input to the game. It’s quite simple: if the player moves N units to the sides, the game trigger an action; same goes for jumping and crouching actions.

From what I read on the past few days, the recommended setup for this kind of project would be an Intel RealSense d415 as a sensor and nuitrack as the library to process the sensor’s outputs.

Saying that, I have a few questions:

1- Am I right on that setup as the best I can get ATM to this specific use-case (specifics sensor + lib)?

2- How is the overhead of the body track processing? Does it rely on a high-end CPU or GPU to get it done? Or is the heavyweight part of it processed directly on the sensor?

3- How stable is the integration with the Unity3D game engine?

4- Is it feasible to recognize only the person who started the game as the player (it is a single-player game) even with many people walking close to the player while he is playing? The game will be presented outdoors at a gaming event, and that will be very bad if the game recognizes any other people walking by as real input to the game. If this is feasible indeed, please point me some functions or code samples to achieve this.

Thanks in advance!

2

Hi André,

  1. Yes, you can use the mentioned sensors with Nuitrack to develop your Unity application. Skeleton tracking depends on the quality of a depth map, so we can recommend you to use Kinect V2, because we observe a so called “waving effect” with RealSense sensors. Recommended tracking distance for RealSense sensors is only about 1-1.5 meters. You can also consider Orbbec sensors.

  2. Processing is performed on your Windows machine. Nuitrack isn’t processed on a sensor.

  3. GPU is not necessary. Recommended CPU is Intel Core i3 or higher . Nuitrack requires about 200 Mb of RAM.

  4. What do you mean by “stable”? We provide an official Unity package in Nuitrack SDK to make integration of our SDK in Unity easier for Unity developers. Recommended Unity version for stable operation is 2017.4 or higher. You can take a look at our Unity tutorial projects, they’re all checked and should work fine on your PC. If you encounter any problems in Unity with Nuitrack, you can always contact us and we’ll try to fix the problem as soon as possible.

  5. Actually, the main issue may be connected to using the sensor outdoors. Have you already checked this case? Nuitrack processes a depth map from a 3D sensor, and the quality of the map outdoors may be very low due to direct sunlight. You can actually limit the area of detection and use calibration as a user starts the game to make sure that only this person is detected, but we recommend you to test a sensor outdoors first. You can download Nuitrack Trial for this purpose: https://nuitrack.com/#pricing

3

First of all thanks for answering my questions @iosif.semenyuk .

May you elaborate a bit more about how to “limit the area of detection” and how to use “calibration” to get only the real player being tracked?

4

Nuitrack allows you to handle up to 6 users at a time. Calibration means using the id of the selected user to control the character in the game. You can find the info on how to limit the detection zone here: Detection of person lying on a surface or against a surface