Increasing Sense of Presence by Convincing

Avatars and Haptic Feedback

in a Game-Oriented Shared Virtual Environment

The Game

Project Goals

Cast convincing avatars as “actors”.Implement haptic feedback.Make the environment a shareable experience.

Convincing Avatars - Appearance

Convincing Avatars - Appearance

A few models available, and possibility to export from 3D Studio MAX.Could probably modify and apply other textures.Would you play air-hockey

with a skeleton?How about Godzilla?

Convincing Avatars - Control

Convincing Avatars - Control

Object-oriented structure.Each object has methods for moving it, and the model enforces coherence.Polygonal mesh (skin) moves with the skeleton (bones).

Convincing Avatars - Movement

Convincing Avatars - Movement

Now saved as animations from MAX.Full-body tracking solutions “available”.Some preliminary work done in other labs for inverse kinematics.Crucial to making avatars convincing.

Haptic Feedback

Vibrating mouse: drivers available, but bulky and only gives relative position.Cell-phone vibrator: small, but no drivers available.How much

feedback toprovide?

Haptic Feedback Wishlist ;)

The sensation of stepping in a processed meat product every time you get spam in your mailbox. The sensation of your hand going into a meat grinder when you delete an important file. The sensation of burning flesh to warn you your CPU's overheating. The sensation of falling through a glass window from the 60th floor of a high-rise building every time Windows crashes. Oh wait, I always feel that way anyway.

Shared Experience

No computer-simulated player can be as good as a human.Most probably

over a network:some morelatency here.

Tracking

Use the 4 “birds” of the magnetic tracker.Alternative placements: what’s more important for a 1st person view: the arm, or the rest of the body?

Implementation

Get CAL3D working with the trackers.Implement IK for movements.Make some crude game environment.Implement collision detection.Implement haptic feedback.Implement multi-player.