An Aerial Mixed-Reality Environment for First-Person-View Drone Flying

Abstract

A drone be able to fly without colliding to preserve the surroundings and its own safety. In addition, it must also incorporate numerous features of interest for drone users. In this paper, an aerial mixed-reality environment for first-person-view drone flying is proposed to provide an immersive experience and a safe environment for drone users by creating additional virtual obstacles when flying a drone in an open area. The proposed system is effective in perceiving the depth of obstacles, and enables bidirectional interaction between real and virtual worlds using a drone equipped with a stereo camera based on human binocular vision. In addition, it synchronizes the parameters of the real and virtual cameras to effectively and naturally create virtual objects in a real space. Based on user studies that included both general and expert users, we confirm that the proposed system successfully creates a mixed-reality environment using a flying drone by quickly recognizing real objects and stably combining them with virtual objects.