Realizing a Mixed Reality Space Guided by a Virtual Human;Creating a Virtual Human from Incomplete 3-D Motion Data

  • Abe, Shinsuke (Department of Mechanical and Control Engineering Kyushu Institute of Technology) ;
  • Yamaguti, Iku (Department of Mechanical and Control Engineering Kyushu Institute of Technology) ;
  • Tan, Joo Kooi (Department of Mechanical and Control Engineering Kyushu Institute of Technology) ;
  • Ishikawa, Seiji (Department of Mechanical and Control Engineering Kyushu Institute of Technology)
  • Published : 2003.10.22

Abstract

Recently the VR technique has evolved into a mixed reality (MR) technique, in which a user can observe a real world in front of him/her as well as virtual objects displayed. This has been realized by the employment of a see-through type HMD (S-HMD). We have been developing a mixed reality space employing the MR technique. The objective of our study is to realize a virtual human that acts as a man-machine interface in the real space. It is important in the study to create a virtual human acting naturally in front of a user. In order to give natural motions to the virtual human, we employ a developed motion capture technique. We have already created various 3-D human motion models by the motion capture technique. In this paper, we present a technique for creating a virtual human using a human model provided by a computer graphics software, 3D Studio Max(C). The main difficulty of this issue is that 3D Studio Max(C) claims 28 feature points for describing a human motion, but the used motion capture system assumes less number of feature points. Therefore a technique is proposed in the paper for producing motion data of 28 feature points from the motion data of less number of feature points or from incomplete motion data. Performance of the proposed technique was examined by observing visually the demonstration of some motions of a created virtual human and overall natural motions were realized.

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