{"id":10516,"date":"2020-10-06T11:09:00","date_gmt":"2020-10-06T09:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.laval-virtual.com\/?p=10516"},"modified":"2020-12-21T14:50:15","modified_gmt":"2020-12-21T13:50:15","slug":"virtual-human-project-the-toolbox-for-avatars-animation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.laval-virtual.com\/en\/virtual-human-project-the-toolbox-for-avatars-animation\/","title":{"rendered":"Virtual Human Project: the toolbox for avatar animation"},"content":{"rendered":"

How to imagine a good immersion in Virtual Reality<\/a> without a sense of social presence with the virtual characters populating the environments? For Geoffrey Gorisse<\/a>, assistant professor at the Arts et Métiers institute of Laval<\/a>, avatar visual and behavioral consistency is crucial to foster social interaction effects in virtual reality applications.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perfecting the human aspects of avatars<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Avatar visual fidelity was at the heart of Geoffrey’s research conducted during his thesis and his post-doctoral stay at the Event Lab, University of Barcelona in 2019. One year later, in this quest for realism, the project came to maturity. He took advantage of the lockdown period to develop the Virtual Human Project (VHP)<\/strong> for Unity<\/a> (one of the most widely used 3D engines used for video game and VR development): a toolkit to provide Virtual Reality<\/a> developers with a package of optimized functions for avatar procedural animation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It aims to improve the human aspect of virtual characters based on 3 main features: gaze<\/strong> (multiple strategies from static to probabilistic), lip synchronization <\/strong>(based on pre-recorded or real-time audio inputs) and emotions <\/strong>(anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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