Placement Retargeting of Virtual Avatars to Dissimilar Indoor Environments

Abstract

Fig. 1: AR telepresence spaces seen from the perspective views (bottom) of the User X in Space A (left) and User Y in Space B (right), and the egocentric views of the users seeing the avatar of the other party (top). The avatars are placed by our method to preserve the semantics of the placement the other party. Abstract-Rapidly developing technologies are realizing a 3D telepresence, in which geographically separated users can interact with each other through their virtual avatars. In this paper, we present novel methods to determine the avatar's position in an indoor space to preserve the semantics of the user's position in a dissimilar indoor space with different space configurations and furniture layouts. To this end, we first perform a user survey on the preferred avatar placements for various indoor configurations and user placements, and identify a set of related attributes, including interpersonal relation, visual attention, pose, and spatial characteristics, and quantify these attributes with a set of features. By using the obtained dataset and identified features, we train a neural network that predicts the similarity between two placements. Next, we develop an avatar placement method that preserves the semantics of the placement of the remote user in a different space as much as possible. We show the effectiveness of our methods by implementing a prototype AR-based telepresence system and user evaluations.

The Effect of Multisensory Pseudo-Haptic Feedback on Perception of Virtual Weight

“…Based on this development and social needs, VR applications that provide entertainment [22], [27] and productivity (e.g., vSpatial, Oculus Medium) are being developed actively. Although VR has great potential in providing new experience and opportunities, there are still many issues left to be solved for VR to be applied in various fields such as industry, health-care system, teleoperation, and remote collaboration [35], [53]. Foremost of the issues is that VR needs to provide more immersive and realistic haptic experiences to augment the sense of real-world in the virtual environment [39], and to let users acquire more information and react properly as in the real-world.…”

A Mixed Reality Telepresence System for Dissimilar Spaces Using Full-Body Avatar

“…• Candidate interaction targets include the partner's head, a shared screen, and augmented virtual objects for pointing and gazing activities. We use an avatar placement algorithm from our prior work [Yoon et al 2020], which finds the avatar's placement in a dissimilar space as similar as possible to the user's placement. If the user engages in interaction with the partner or a shared virtual object, the avatar's movement is decoupled from the user's and made to realize the interaction context in the remote space by controlling the avatar's head and arm to point the same targets.…”

“…The placement of avatar from the different environment of two spaces have been studied by [Jo et al 2015;Yoon et al 2020]. However, to our knowledge, a telepresence system that places an avatar to an optimal location and animate it to keep the interaction context has not been developed yet.…”

“…This paper presents our work to contribute to this goal. Specifically, we exploit our prior work [Yoon et al 2020] for the avatar placement. In addition, this paper newly introduces our avatar gesture retargeting method, which detects a deictic pointing gesture of user and retargets it to avatar.…”

A Full Body Avatar-Based Telepresence System for Dissimilar Spaces

“…The avatar placement from the different environment of two spaces has been studied by [9,29]. However, to our knowledge, a telepresence system that places an avatar to an optimal location and animates it to keep the interaction context has not been developed yet.…”