Placement Retargeting of Virtual Avatars to Dissimilar Indoor Environments

Emotionally expressive avatars for collaborative virtual environments

Capturing Behaviour for the Use of Avatars in Virtual Environments

Avatars, representations of people in virtual environments, are subject to human control. However, for most applications, it is impractical for a person to directly control each joint in a complex avatar. Rather, people must be allowed to specify complex behaviours with simple instructions and the avatar permitted to select the correct movements in sequence to execute the instruction. This requ...

The use of emotionally expressive avatars in Collaborative Virtual Environments

We argue that the use of collaborative virtual environments (CVE) which incorporate emotionally expressive avatars has the potential to engender empathy amongst users of such environments, and that the use of this technology is potentially valuable for people with autism. Empirical work in both areas is discussed. Results suggest that the introduction of emotional expressiveness enriches the su...

Talk to the Virtual Hands: Self-Animated Avatars Improve Communication in Head-Mounted Display Virtual Environments

BACKGROUND When we talk to one another face-to-face, body gestures accompany our speech. Motion tracking technology enables us to include body gestures in avatar-mediated communication, by mapping one's movements onto one's own 3D avatar in real time, so the avatar is self-animated. We conducted two experiments to investigate (a) whether head-mounted display virtual reality is useful for resear...

Video Stereoscopic Avatars for the CAVETM Virtual Environments

This proposed study is a design and development project based on the concept that by using stereoscopic video cameras together with a retroreflective backdrop behind the user, it is possible to extract a CAVETM or I-DeskTM user’s stereoscopic image and integrate it into the 3D projection. This paper discusses various possible technical solutions that might make this concept work and their poten...