The term virtual reality is gaining popularity nowadays, even though it started long ago. The concept of virtual reality began in the 1950s as science fiction, but it took 60 years to become more popular and acceptable. Why it is more popular now? The answer is the availability of cheap computing. Before, a virtual reality headset was very expensive. Now, we can build one for $5. You may have heard about Google Cardboard, which is the cheapest virtual reality headset available currently, and there are many upcoming models based on it. Now we only need a good smartphone and cheap virtual reality (VR) headset to get the virtual reality experience. There are also high-end VR headsets such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive that have a high frame rate and response.
In this chapter, we will discuss a ROS project in which we can control a robot using a Leap Motion sensor and experience the robot environment using a virtual reality headset. We will demonstrate this project using a TurtleBot simulation in Gazebo and control the robot using Leap Motion. To visualize the robot environment, we will use a cheap VR headset along with an Android smartphone.
Here are the main topics we will discuss in this chapter:
- Getting started with a VR headset and Leap Motion
- Project prerequisites
- Design and working of the project
- Installing the Leap Motion SDK on Ubuntu
- Playing with the Leap Motion visualizer tool
- Installing ROS packages for Leap Motion
- Visualizing Leap Motion data in Rviz
- Creating a teleoperation node for Leap Motion
- Building and installing the ROS-VR Android application
- Working with the ROS-VR application and interfacing with Gazebo
- Working with the TurtleBot simulation in VR
- Troubleshooting the ROS-VR application
- Integrating the ROS-VR application and Leap Motion teleoperation