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

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

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

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 to provide?

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 60 th 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 more latency here.

Tracking Use the 4 “birds” of the magnetic tracker. Alternative placements: what’s more important for a 1 st 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.