The Rocketbox library and the utility of freely available rigged avatars
- Mar Gonzalez Franco ,
- Eyal Ofek ,
- Ye Pan ,
- Angus Antley ,
- Anthony Steed ,
- Bernhard Spanlang ,
- Antonella Maselli ,
- Domna Banakou ,
- Nuria Pelechano ,
- Sergio Orts-Escolano ,
- Veronica Orvalho ,
- Laura Trutoiu ,
- Markus Wojcik ,
- Maria V. Sanchez-Vives ,
- Jeremy Bailenson ,
- Mel Slater ,
- Jaron Lanier
Frontiers in Virtual Reality |
TECHNOLOGY AND CODE ARTICLE Front. Virtual Real. | frvir.2020.561558
As part of the open sourcing of the Microsoft Rocketbox avatar library for research and academic purposes, here we discuss the importance of rigged avatars for the Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR, AR) research community. Avatars, virtual representations of humans, are widely used in VR applications. Furthermore many research areas ranging from crowd simulation to neuroscience, psychology or sociology have used avatars to investigate new theories or to demonstrate how they influence human performance and interactions.
We divide this paper in two main parts: the first one gives an overview of the different methods available to create and animate avatars. We cover the current main alternatives for face and body animation as well introduce upcoming capture methods. The second part presents the scientific evidence of the utility of using rigged avatars for embodiment but also for applications such as crowd simulation and entertainment. All in all this paper attempts to convey why rigged avatars will be key to the future of VR and its wide adoption.
Copyright: © 2020 Gonzalez-Franco, Ofek, Pan, Antley, Steed, Spanlang, Maselli, Banakou, Pelechano, Orts-Escolano, Orvalho, Trutoiu, Wojcik, Sanchez-Vives, Bailenson, Slater and Lanier. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Publication Downloads
Microsoft Rocketbox Avatar Library
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The Microsoft Rocketbox Avatar library consists of 115 characters and avatars fully rigged and with high definition that was developed over the course of 10 years. The diversity of the characters and the quality of the rigging together with a relatively low-poly meshes, makes this library the go-to asset among research laboratories worldwide from crowd simulation to real-time avatar embodiment and social Virtual Reality (VR). Ever since their launch, laboratories around the globe have been using the library and many of the lead authors in the VR community have extensively used these avatars during their research. Download from GitHub > Contributors Mar Gonzalez-Franco - Microsoft Research Markus Wojcik - Rocketbox (Original avatar creation team) Eyal Ofek - Microsoft Research Anthony Steed - University College London, (Visiting Researcher at Microsoft Research when this was conceived) Dave Garagan - Havok
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Microsoft Rocketbox avatar library
The Microsoft Rocketbox Avatar library consists of 115 characters and avatars fully rigged and with high definition that was developed over the course of 10 years. The diversity of the characters and the quality of the rigging together with a relatively low-poly meshes, makes this library the go-to asset among research laboratories worldwide from crowd simulation to real-time avatar embodiment and social Virtual Reality (VR). Ever since their launch, laboratories around the globe have been using the library and many of the lead authors in the VR community have extensively used these avatars during their research.
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