Integration of a Balanced Virtual Manikin in a Virtual Reality Platform aimed at Virtual Prototyping

TL;DR

This paper presents a real-time virtual human control system with balance management integrated into a virtual reality platform for enhanced virtual prototyping and digital human interaction.

Contribution

It introduces a novel balance controller for virtual humans in real-time VR environments, addressing a previously unhandled challenge in digital human control.

Findings

Successful implementation of a balance controller in real-time VR

Improved realism and feasibility of virtual human movements

Enhanced interaction capabilities in virtual prototyping environments

Abstract

The work presented here is aimed at introducing a virtual human controller in a virtual prototyping framework. After a brief introduction describing the problem solved in the paper, we describe the interest as for digital humans in the context of concurrent engineering. This leads us to draw a control architecture enabling to drive virtual humans in a real-time immersed way, and to interact with the product, through motion capture. Unfortunately, we show this control scheme can lead to unfeasible movements because of the lack of balance control. Introducing such a controller is a problem that was never addressed in the context of real-time. We propose an implementation of a balance controller, that we insert into the previously described control scheme. Next section is dedicated to show the results we obtained. Finally, we propose a virtual reality platform into which the digital character controller is integrated.