Real-Time Generation of Leg Animation for Walking-in-Place Techniques

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time, kinematic approach using animation rigging and Kinect tracking to generate natural leg animations for walking-in-place in virtual environments, enhancing realism and integration.

Contribution

A novel real-time method leveraging Kinect and inverse kinematics for natural leg animation in walking-in-place techniques.

Findings

Produced convincing forward-backward leg movements during walking.

Method is easily integrable into existing walking-in-place systems.

User study confirms the effectiveness of the approach.

Abstract

Generating forward-backward self-representation leg animation in virtual environments for walking-in-place (WIP) techniques is an underexplored research topic. A challenging aspect of the problem is to find an appropriate mapping from tracked vertical foot motion to natural cyclical movements of real walking. In this work, we present a kinematic approach based on animation rigging to generating real-time leg animation. Our method works by tracking vertical in-place foot movements of a user with a Kinect v2 sensor and mapping tracked foot height to inverse kinematics (IK) targets. These IK targets were aligned with an avatar's feet to guide the virtual feet to perform cyclic walking motions. We conducted a user study to evaluate our approach. Results showed that the proposed method produced compelling forward-backward leg animation during walking. We show that the proposed technique can be easily integrated into existing WIP techniques.