Lower body control of a semi-autonomous avatar in Virtual Reality: Balance and Locomotion of a 3D Bipedal Model

Vincent Thomasset (1) , Stéphane Caron (2) , Vincent Weistroffer (1)

1 DIASI - Département Intelligence Ambiante et Systèmes Interactifs
2 IDH - Interactive Digital Humans

Animated virtual humans may rely on full-body tracking system to reproduce user motions. In this paper, we reduce tracking to the upper-body and reconstruct the lower body to follow autonomously its upper counterpart. Doing so reduces the number of sensors required, making the application of virtual humans simpler and cheaper. It also enable deployment in cluttered scenes where the lower body is often hidden. The contribution here is the inversion of the well-known capture problem for bipedal walking. It determines footsteps rather than center-of-mass motions and yet can be solved with an off-the-shelf capture problem solver. The quality of our method is assessed in real-time tracking experiments on a wide variety of movements.

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]; Automatic; Computer Science [cs]; Modeling and Simulation

Vincent Thomasset, Stéphane Caron, Vincent Weistroffer. Lower body control of a semi-autonomous avatar in Virtual Reality: Balance and Locomotion of a 3D Bipedal Model. VRST 2019 - 25th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology, Nov 2019, Sidney, Australia. ⟨cea-02385996⟩