On the Plausibility of Virtual Body Animation Features in Virtual Reality

Henrique Galvan Debarba*, Sylvain Chague, Caecilia Charbonnier

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

15 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We present two experiments to assess the relative impact of different levels of body animation fidelity on plausibility illusion (Psi). The first experiment presents a virtual character that is not controlled by the user ( n=13), while the second experiment presents a user-controlled virtual avatar ( n=24, all male). Psi concerns how realistic and coherent the events in a virtual environment look and feel and is part of Slater's proposition of two orthogonal components of presence in virtual reality (VR). In the experiments, the face, hands, upper and lower bodies of the character or self-avatar were manipulated to present different degrees of animation fidelity, such as no animation, procedural animation, and motion captured animation. Participants started the experiment experiencing the best animation configuration. Then, animation features were reduced to limit the amount of captured information made available to the system. Participants had to move from this basic animation configuration towards a more complete one, and declare when the avatar animation realism felt equivalent to the initial and most complete configuration, which could happen before all animation features were maxed out. Participants in the self-avatar experiment were also asked to rate how each animation feature affected their sense of control of the virtual body. We found that a virtual body with upper and lower body animated using eight tracked rigid bodies and inverse kinematics (IK) was often perceived as equivalent to a professional capture pipeline relying on 53 markers. Compared to what standard VR kits in the market are offering, i.e., a tracked headset and two hand controllers, we found that foot tracking, followed by mouth animation and finger tracking, were the features that added the most to the sense of control of a self-representing avatar. In addition, these features were often among the first to be improved in both experiments.

Original languageEnglish
JournalIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Volume28
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)1880-1893
Number of pages14
ISSN1077-2626
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Apr 2022
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was funded by the European Commission as part of the H2020 program, under the Grant agreement 762111, VRTogether.

Publisher Copyright:
© 1995-2012 IEEE.

Keywords

  • agency
  • character animation
  • plausibility illusion
  • presence
  • Self-representing avatar animation
  • sense of control

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