Avatars

The first person avatar represents the location and pose of the user’s body in virtual reality (VR), when the head mounted display (HMD) obscure the direct view of the user’s body.

Past works has shown the importance of the first person avatar for interaction, self image of the user and even imersiveness of the virtual reality experience.

At the EPIC group of Microsoft research we are looking on ways that we can manipulate the perception of user’s in virtual reality by presenting first person avatars that represents the pose of the user’s body differently than the actual body pose is. Using the embodiment of the avatar, generated by moving the avatar in a very similar (but not exact) motion of the user’s body, we gradually depart the avatar from the user’s pose and by doing so effect the user’s actual motion in VR.

An attractive use of this technique is rendering of touch sensation for people in VR using existing physical objects in their environment such as walls, table or hand held objects. Using uninstrumented objects is called ‘passive haptics’ (in contrast to ‘active haptics’ that uses mechanized objects controlled by a computer). A major problem when using inanimate objects is bringing them to the exact positions in the user’s environment that will correspond to the locations of the virtual objects that they mimic. Our approach does the opposite, and bring the user’s hands, that reach toward the virtual objects, to the real objects in a synchronized fashion. At the exact moment that the avatar hand will touch the virtual object, the user’s real hand will touch a real object that lies in a different location.

The 2016 paper ‘Haptic retargeting‘ (Azmandian et. al), showed that it is possible to fool users to build a whole pyramid made of many cubes, using a single wooden cube, where the user hand reaching to many different virtual cubes is repeatedly redirected to the same physical cube.

A later work form CHI 2017, ‘Sparse Haptic Proxy: Touch Feedback in Virtual Environments using a General Passive Prop‘ (Chang t. al. ) showed expansion of this work to general geometries and general virtual experiences.

Figure 1: The user of Virtual Reality, may find himself in different virtual worlds, such as a spy game (middle) or a space simulator(right) , yet they all give him tangible feedback using the same physical geometry in the real world (left).