Insert your own body in the oculus rift to improve proprioception

A natural interaction in virtual reality environments, in particular when wearing head-mounted-displays, is often prevented by the lack of a visual feedback about the user's own body. This paper aims to create a virtual environment, in which the user can visually perceive his/her own body, and can interact with the virtual objects, by using a virtual body that replicates his/her movements. To this aim, we have set up an affordable virtual reality system, which combines the Oculus Rift head-mounted-display, a Microsoft Kinect, and a Leap Motion, in order to recreate inside the virtual environments a first-person avatar, who replicates the movements of the user's full-body and the fine movements of his/her fingers and hands. By acting in such an environment, the user is able to perceive him/herself thus improving his/her experience in the virtual reality. Here, we address and propose a solution to the issues related to the integration of the different devices, and to the alignment and registration of their reference systems. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed system is assessed through an experimental session, in which several users report their feeling by answering to a 5-points Likert scale questionnaire.