Human-scale haptic interaction with a reactive virtual human in a real-time physics simulator

Abstract

In this article we propose a framework for haptic interaction with a reactive virtual human in a physically simulated virtual world. The user controls an avatar in the virtual world via human-scale haptic interface and interacts with the virtual human through the avatar. The virtual human recognizes the user's motion and reacts to it. We create a virtual boxing system as an application of the proposed framework. We performed an experiment to evaluate the validity of the reaction of the virtual human. We got confirmation that the proposed framework creates realistic reactions and that users can easily estimate the input motions of the avatar.