Spanlang B. et al. A First Person Avatar System with Haptic Feedback.
Spanlang B., Normand J.-M., Giannopoulos E. & Slater M. A First Person Avatar System with Haptic Feedback. Proceedings of the 17th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST), 2010, 47-50.
We describe a system that shows how to substitute a person’s body in virtual reality by a virtual body (or avatar). The avatar is seen from a first person perspective, moves as the person moves and the system generates touch on the real person’s body when the avatar is touched in the virtual environment. Such replacement of the person’s real body by a virtual body requires a wide field-of-view headmounted display, real-time whole body tracking, and tactile feed- back. We show how to achieve this with a variety of off-the-shelf hardware and software, and also custom systems we developed for real-time avatar rendering and realtime collision detection and mapping for haptic rendering via a vibrotactile device. We present an overview of the system and detail some of its components: in partic- ular we present a novel GPU based collision detection and mapping technique for haptic vibrotactile feedback. We provide examples of how such a system is being used in some of our current experimen- tal studies of embodiment.
