Abstract
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.
Highlights
When representing users or computer-controlled agents within computer graphics systems we have a range of alternatives from abstract and cartoon-like, through human-like to fantastic creations from our imagination
And highly useful as a control, if there is asynchrony or incongruence between sensory inputs or in sensorimotor correlations, the illusion breaks (Berger et al, 2018; Gonzalez-Franco and Berger, 2019). This body ownership effect that was first demonstrated with a rubber hand (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998), has been replicated in a large number of instances with virtual avatars,. This means that self-avatars allow us to interact with others as we would do in the real world, but are critical for non-social Virtual Reality (VR) experiences
We describe the particularities of the use and creation of the Microsoft Rocketbox avatar library and we discuss the consequences of the open source release (Mic, 2020)
Summary
When representing users or computer-controlled agents within computer graphics systems we have a range of alternatives from abstract and cartoon-like, through human-like to fantastic creations from our imagination. And highly useful as a control, if there is asynchrony or incongruence between sensory inputs (either in space or in time) or in sensorimotor correlations, the illusion breaks (Berger et al, 2018; Gonzalez-Franco and Berger, 2019) This body ownership effect that was first demonstrated with a rubber hand (Botvinick and Cohen, 1998), has been replicated in a large number of instances with virtual avatars, (for a review see the Slater and Sanchez-Vives, 2016; Gonzalez-Franco and Lanier, 2017). This means that self-avatars allow us to interact with others as we would do in the real world, but are critical for non-social VR experiences. We describe the particularities of the use and creation of the Microsoft Rocketbox avatar library and we discuss the consequences of the open source release (Mic, 2020)
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