Exploring Embodied Experience of Flying in a Virtual Reality Game with Kinect

Immersive Virtual Reality (VR) as a research tool provides numerous opportunities of what one can do and see in a virtual world which is not possible in real world. Being able to fly is an experience that humans have long dreamed of achieving. In this paper, we introduce a VR game where participants can use their body gestures as a Natural User Interface (NUI) to control flying movements via a Microsoft Kinect. The goal of this research is to explore the navigational experience of flying via body gestures: what people like to do, what they want to be, and most importantly, how they map their gestures to navigation control easily in a VR environment.