Exploring the Perception of Center of Mass changes for VR Avatars

International audiencePopulating Virtual Environments with animated virtual characters often involves retargeting motions to 3D body models withdiffering shapes. A user’s avatar, for example, should move in a way that is consistent with their model’s body shape in orderto maintain the sense of presence. We present a set of perception experiments to explore how motions captured from actors withvarious body mass indices (BMI) are perceived, when they are retargeted to characters with different BMIs. We also exploredthe perceptual effects of retargeting average and physics-based motions. To explore the latter, we devised a physics-basedcontroller framework that utilizes motion, target body weight, and height as inputs to generate retargeted motions. Despitethe controller generating varied motions for various body shapes, average motions consistently outperformed the controller-generated motions in terms of naturalness. Overall, this work highlights an anthropometric based physics controller and a novelapproach for perceptual evaluation of human motion retargeting for virtual characters