Real-Time Lower-Limb Motion Embodiment in Virtual Reality from a Single Waist-Wearable Camera

BackgroundFor the interactions in virtual reality, it is essential to map the user’s physical motion to the avatar in the virtual world. While reliable lower-limb motions are available under pre-installed cameras, the range of the walking motion is limited by the infrastructures.MethodWe propose a new wearable solution to reproduce the lower-limb motions and map them to the virtual avatar in real time. We employ a single depth camera and design a waist-wearable layout to capture the lower-limb motions relative to the waist. By exploiting the vision data observed by the camera, we further estimate the global velocity of the user.ResultsExperiments are carried out to verify our solution. We quantitatively evaluate the estimated global velocity with an optical motion capture system. We also map the recovered lower-limb motion to the avatar and utilize a standard questionnaire to measure the sense of embodiment. The experiments show that our wearable solution are feasible and effective, being applicable to different people from the perceptual perspective.ConclusionsThe results verify that users are allowed to naturally explore the virtual world with the embodiment using the lightweight equipment.