Abstract
Interactive virtual characters are nowadays commonplace in games, animations, and Virtual Reality (VR) applications. However, relatively few work has so far considered the animation of interactive object manipulations performed by virtual humans. In this paper, we first present a hierarchical control architecture incorporating plans, behaviors, and motor programs that enables virtual humans to accurately manipulate scene objects using different grasp types. Furthermore, as second main contribution, we introduce a method by which virtual humans learn to imitate object manipulations performed by human VR users. To this end, movements of the VR user are analyzed and processed into abstract actions. A new data structure called grasp events is used for storing information about user interactions with scene objects. High-level plans are instantiated based on grasp events to drive the virtual humans’ animation. Due to their high-level representation, recorded manipulations often naturally adapt to new situations without losing plausibility.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Jung, B., Ben Amor, H., Heumer, G., Weber, M.: From Motion Capture to Action Capture: A Review of Imitation Learning Techniques and their Application to VRbased Character Animation. In: Proceedings ACM VRST 2006, Cyprus (2006)
Kallmann, M., Thalmann, D.: Direct 3D Interaction with Smart Objects. In: Proceedings ACM VRST 1999, London (1999)
Sanso, R.M., Thalmann, D.: A Hand Control and Automatic Grasping System for Synthetic Actors. Computer Graphics Forum 13(3), 167–177 (1994)
Kuffner, J., Latombe, J.: Interactive Manipulation Planning for Animated Characters. In: Proceedings of Pacific Graphics (2000)
Yamane, K., Kuffner, J.J., Hodgins, J.K.: Synthesizing Animations of Human Manipulation Tasks. ACM Trans. Graph. 23(3), 532–539 (2004)
Douville, B., Levison, L., Badler, N.: Task-level Object Grasping for Simulated Agents. Presence 5(4), 416–430 (1996)
Pollard, N., Zordan, V.B.: Physically Based Grasping Control from Example. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (2005)
Tramberend, H.: Avocado: A Distributed Virtual Reality Framework. In: Proceedings of IEEE Virtual Reality, vol. 14 (1999)
Hudson, T., Lin, M., Cohen, J., Gottschalk, S., Manocha, D.: V-COLLIDE: Accelerated Collision Detection for VRML. In: Proceedings of VRML 1997 (1997)
Cutkosky, M.: On Grasp Choice, Grasp Models and the Design of Hands for Manufacturing Tasks. IEEE Trans. on Robotics and Automation 5(3) (1989)
Schlesinger, G.: Der Mechanische Aufbau der Künstlichen Glieder. In: Borchardt, M., et al. (eds.) Ersatzglieder und Arbeitshilfen für Kriegsbeschädigte und Unfallverletzte, pp. 321–661. Springer, Berlin (1919)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Weber, M., Heumer, G., Ben Amor, H., Jung, B. (2006). An Animation System for Imitation of Object Grasping in Virtual Reality. In: Pan, Z., Cheok, A., Haller, M., Lau, R.W.H., Saito, H., Liang, R. (eds) Advances in Artificial Reality and Tele-Existence. ICAT 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4282. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11941354_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11941354_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-49776-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49779-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)