A Low-Cost Head and Eye Tracking System for Realistic Eye Movements in Virtual Avatars

A virtual avatar or autonomous agent is a digital representation of a human being that can be controlled by either a human or an artificially intelligent computer system. Increasingly avatars are becoming realistic virtual human characters that exhibit human behavioral traits, body language and eye and head movements. As the interpretation of eye and head movements represents an important part of nonverbal human communication it is extremely important to accurately reproduce these movements in virtual avatars to avoid falling into the well-known “uncanny valley”. In this paper we present a cheap hybrid real-time head and eye tracking system based on existing open source software and commonly available hardware. Our evaluation indicates that the system of head and eye tracking is stable and accurate and can allow a human user to robustly puppet a virtual avatar, potentially allowing us to train an A.I. system to learn realistic human head and eye movements.