The Rocketbox Library and the Utility of Freely Available Rigged Avatars

As part of the open sourcing of the Microsoft Rocketbox avatar library for research and academic purposes, here we discuss the importance of rigged avatars for the Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR, AR) research community. Avatars, virtual representations of humans, are widely used in VR applications. Furthermore many research areas ranging from crowd simulation to neuroscience, psychology, or sociology have used avatars to investigate new theories or to demonstrate how they influence human performance and interactions. We divide this paper in two main parts: the first one gives an overview of the different methods available to create and animate avatars. We cover the current main alternatives for face and body animation as well introduce upcoming capture methods. The second part presents the scientific evidence of the utility of using rigged avatars for embodiment but also for applications such as crowd simulation and entertainment. All in all this paper attempts to convey why rigged avatars will be key to the future of VR and its wide adoption

Your space or mine? : Mapping self in time

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Social Interactions in Virtual Reality: Challenges and Potential

This panel will discuss the current technical challenges of social interaction in VR as well as the potential for using virtual reality as a social interface. We will consider face-to-face interactions, representations of full body avatars, and multi-user interaction. We will focus on discussing technical challenges, including tracking and animation, which are currently limiting social interactions in VR. The immense sensitivity of human perception to biological motion, either faces or full body motion, is driving the high requirements for any kind of animation in VR. In recent years, a lot of progress has been made in the field of facial animation and performance capture, mostly for use in feature animation or high-end game production, but little has made its way into the field of Virtual Reality so far. If the real-time requirements could be met without sacrificing too much quality, VR research could strongly benefit from these advances in order to develop compelling multi-user social interactions. The panelists are researchers leading the efforts to design, implement, and facilitate the next generation VR social interactions. Each panelist will provide a 5-10 minute presentations on the most pressing challenges for enabling VR social interaction from their perspective. Panelists will speak about their area of expertise in brief presentations, 5-10 minutes, on the topics below. Further, we will present successful applications that exist today that use virtual reality to enable social interactions and innovations that are needed for these applications to reach a larger audience. The moderators will then start a discussion, followed by questions from the audience

Circular, linear, and curvilinear vection in a large-screen virtual environment with floor projection

Vection is defined as the compelling sensation of illusory self-motion elicited by a moving sensory, usually visual, stimulus. This paper presents collected introspective data, user discomfort and perceived speed data for the experience of linear, circular, and curvilinear vection in a large-screen, immersive, virtual environment. As a first step we evaluated the effectiveness of a floor projection on the perception of vection for four trajectories: linear forward, linear backward, circular left, and circular right. The floor projection, which considerably extended the field of view, was found to significantly improve the introspective measures of linear, but not circular, vection experienced in a photo-realistic three-dimensional town. In a second study we investigated the differences between 12 different motion trajectories on the illusion of self-motion. In this study we found that linear translations to the left and right are perceived as the least convincing, while linear down is perceived as the most convincing of the linear trajectories. Second, we found that while linear forward vection is not perceived to be very convincing, curvilinear forward vection is reported to be as convincing as circular vection. In a third and final experiment we investigated the perceived speed for all different trajectories and acquired data based on simulator sickness questionnaires to compute a discomfort factor associated with each type of trajectory. Considering our experimental results, we offer suggestions for increasing the sense of self-motion in simulators and VE applications, specifically to increase the number of curvilinear trajectories (as opposed to linear ones) and, if possible, add floor projection in order to improve the illusory sense of self-motion

Does Brief Exposure to a Self-avatar Affect Common Human Behaviors in Immersive Virtual Environments?

A plausible assumption is that self-avatars increase the realism of immersive virtual environments (VEs), because self-avatars provide the user with a visual representation of his/her own body. Consequently having a self-avatar might lead to more realistic human behavior in VEs. To test this hypothesis we compared human behavior in VE with and without providing knowledge about a self-avatar with real human behavior in real-space. This comparison was made for three tasks: a locomotion task (moving through the content of the VE), an object interaction task (interacting with the content of the VE), and a social interaction task (interacting with other social entities within the VE). Surprisingly, we did not find effects of a self-avatar exposure on any of these tasks. However, participant’s VE and real world behavior differed significantly. These results challenge the claim that knowledge about the self-avatar substantially influences natural human behavior in immersive VEs

Tricking people into feeling like they are moving when they are not paying attention

Vection refers to illusion of self motion in stationary obervers usually by means of moving visual stimuli [Fischer and Kornmüller 1930]. Linear vection naturally occurs when seated in a train and observing another train on an adjacent track start moving. The very compelling but brief illusion happens as observers are not paying particular attention to the environment but are rather "defocused" from the scene. We studied the effect of two visual attention tasks on the perception of linear vection. The results show a significant decrease in vection onset time with an attention task

Circular, Linear, and Curvilinear Vection in a Large-screen Virtual Environment with Floor Projection

Vection is defined as the compelling sensation of illusory self- motion elicited by a moving sensory, usually visual, stimulus. This paper presents collected introspective data on the experience of linear, circular, and curvilinear vection. We evaluate the differences between twelve different trajectories and the influence of the floor projection on the illusion of self-motion. All of the simulated self- motions examined are of a constant velocity, except for a brief simulated initial acceleration. First, we find that linear translations to the left and right are perceived as the least convincing, while linear down is perceived as the most convincing of the linear trajectories. Second, we find that the floor projection significantly improves the introspective measures of linear vection experienced in a photorealistic three-dimensional town. Finally, we find that while linear forward vection is not perceived to be very convincing, curvilinear forward vection is reported to be as convincing as circular vection. Considering our experimental results, our suggestions for simulators and VE applications where vection is desirable is to increase the number of curvilinear trajectories (as opposed to linear ones) and, if possible, add floor projection in order to improve the illusory sense of self-motion