Real-time Upper Body Articulation of Humans in a Networked Interactive Virtual Environment

With the recent introduction of realistic human entities into large-scale networked virtual environments, there exists a requirement for dynamic, real-time human motion. The future for distributed virtual environments will include upwards of 100,000 participants capable of participating from anywhere in the world, interacting with any entity that exists in the environment. In order to attain a high level of realism in the virtual world, the user must be able to dynamically interact with his environment. For the lower body, we find that scripted locomotive motion is adequate. However, the same is not true for upper body motion because humans by their nature interact with their environment largely with their hands. The focus of this research is the development of an interactive interface which will achieve dynamic upper body motion currently not possible with scripted systems. We present the basics of ongoing work involving the representation of realistic, realtime upper body motion of a virtual human in a networked virtual environment using magnetic sensors attached to the user. 1. Contact Author: [email protected]. Introduction Recently, the computer power available to the Virtual Environments (VE) researcher has progressed to a point where realistic environments and dynamic entities can be portrayed in real-time. This has been particularly important to the pursuit of one of the grandest goals in VE research, insertion of humans into large-scale realistic interactive worlds. While we are still far from achieving all the goals of virtual human interactions, major strides have been taken. We have focused our initial efforts on representing real-time arm motions of humans. This significantly reduces the number of degrees of freedom in the problem. We utilize scripted motions to drive leg movements of our human icon. Focusing on interactive arm motion representation does not result in a significant loss of realism because interactions with the virtual world are largely carried out with the hands.