Abstract
Current Virtual Reality (VR) systems are bereft of stylization and embellishment of the user's motion - concepts that have been well explored in animations for games and movies. We present CooIMoves, a system for expressive and accentuated full-body motion synthesis of a user's virtual avatar in real-time, from the limited input cues afforded by current consumer-grade VR systems, specifically headset and hand positions. We make use of existing motion capture databases as a template motion repository to draw from. We match similar spatio-temporal motions present in the database and then interpolate between them using a weighted distance metric. Joint prediction probability is then used to temporally smooth the synthesized motion, using human motion dynamics as a prior. This allows our system to work well even with very sparse motion databases (e.g., with only 3-5 motions per action). We validate our system with four experiments: a technical evaluation of our quantitative pose reconstruction and three additional user studies to evaluate the motion quality, embodiment and agency.
Highlights
Virtual Reality (VR) allows users to immerse themselves into imaginative worlds and enjoy appearances and behaviors that can be unlike anything in the real world
We propose CoolMoves, a Virtual Reality system that strikes a balance between the replay of pre-generated embellished animations employed in console games and a direct mapping of the user’s motions to their virtual avatar
We can conclude that the accentuated avatar’s hands closely follows that of the input and should help the user retain agency and embodiment over the accentuated avatar. We test this further in our subsequent qualitative user studies. 4.2 Motion Quality Evaluation: Crowd Study Along with benchmarking the performance of CoolMoves on the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) motion capture (MoCap) dataset, we evaluate its pose accentuation on real-world data collected from users in a VR environment
Summary
Virtual Reality (VR) allows users to immerse themselves into imaginative worlds and enjoy appearances and behaviors that can be unlike anything in the real world. The first-person avatar or self-avatar that represents the user typically follows the user’s movements as performed This synchronized mapping of the user’s and the self-avatar’s motions enhances embodiment (i.e., a sense of ownership of the virtual avatar [56, 63]), and the direct control of the avatar motions develops a sense of agency (i.e., a feeling of control over the avatar’s actions and their consequences [50, 54]). Both are important characteristics of captivating VR experiences
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