The Rocketbox Library and the Utility of Freely Available Rigged Avatars

TLDR

Avatars, virtual representations of humans, are widely used in VR applications and have been employed across fields such as crowd simulation, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology to explore theories and influence human performance and interactions. This paper aims to demonstrate the importance of rigged avatars for VR and AR research, outlining their role in future VR adoption and providing an overview of methods for creating and animating avatars. The authors review current face and body animation techniques, introduce emerging capture methods, and present evidence of rigged avatars’ utility for embodiment, crowd simulation, and entertainment. Scientific evidence shows that rigged avatars enhance embodiment and support applications such as crowd simulation and entertainment.

Abstract

As part of the open sourcing of the Microsoft Rocketbox avatar library for research and academic purposes, here we discuss the importance of rigged avatars for the Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR, AR) research community. Avatars, virtual representations of humans, are widely used in VR applications. Furthermore many research areas ranging from crowd simulation to neuroscience, psychology or sociology have used avatars to investigate new theories or to demonstrate how they influence human performance and interactions. We divide this paper in two main parts: the first one gives an overview of the different methods available to create and animate avatars. We cover the current main alternatives for face and body animation as well introduce upcoming capture methods. The second part presents the scientific evidence of the utility of using rigged avatars for embodiment but also for applications such as crowd simulation and entertainment. All in all this paper attempts to convey why rigged avatars will be key to the future of VR and its wide adoption.