Virtual Humans for Representing Participants in Immersive Virtual Environments

The sense of presence requires that participants become part of the virtual environment and equipped with natural behaviors for interaction. This can be accomplished by representing the participants by a virtual human actor with realistic appearance and similar movements to the actual body. Current sensing devices are limited for tracking all joints of the complex human body, therefore the tracked information should be combined with motion generators and behavioral animation to interpolate the joints which are not tracked. In this paper, we explore the problems and solutions in including virtual humans in immersive virtual environments.