From Room Instrumentation to Device Instrumentation: Assessing an Inertial Measurement Unit for Spatial Awareness

Current implementations of spatially-aware multi-surface environments rely heavily on instrumenting the room with different tracking technologies (e.g. Microsoft Kinect, Vicon Cameras). Prior research, however, has shown that real-world deployment using such approaches leads to feasibility issues and users being uncomfortable with the technology in the environment. In this work, we attempt to address these issues by examining the use of a dedicated inertial measurement unit (IMU) in a MSE. We performed a limited user study and present our results that suggest measurements provided by an IMU do not provide value over sensor fusion techniques for spatially-aware MSE’s.