A Virtual Whole Body System

This paper is a practice and experience paper on the use of a low cost optical whole body motion capture system in combination with an ultrasound head tracker and a wide field of view head mounted display (HMD) that enables the user to visually replace his real body with that of a virtual humanoid or alien body. We describe the integration of the low cost Optitrack motion capture system with HALCA a hardware accelerated library for realistic character visualization and real time animation in a Virtual Reality (VR) system. We demonstrate our system by mapping in real-time the tracked whole body motions of a person onto a virtual character which is visualized dynamically with shadows and reflections in a HMD from a first person view. The system is used for neuroscience experiments on virtual body ownership.