A Framework for Immersive VR and Full-Body Avatar Interaction

We present a new software framework for the development of im-mersive collaborative virtual reality applications with emphasis on full-body interaction with virtual humans. The framework is de-signed to be scalable and adaptable to different hardware configura-tions, using either commodity or more expensive hardware setups. High level programming abstractions handle object replication and communication channels for configurations based on multiple ren-dering nodes. The system provides tools for full-body character animation, real-time full-body tracking and retargeting to virtual humans, including motion reconstruction from a small set of sen-sors. Such capabilities allow new full-body interaction metaphors to be developed in fixed or user-perspective stereo visualization. The framework is scalable, customizable, cross-platform and it is only based on tools with source code available