MAPPING ALGORITHMS FOR REAL-TIME CONTROL OF AN AVATAR USING 8 SENSORS

In a virtual environment for small groups of interacting participants, it is important that the physical motion of each participant be repli cated by synthetic human forms in real time. Sensors on a user's body are used to drive an inverse kinematics algorithm. Such iterative algo rithms for solving the general inverse kinematics problem are too slow for a real-time interactive environment. In this paper we present ana lytic, constant-time methods to solve the inverse kinematics problem a nd drive an avatar figure. Our sensor configuration has only eight sen sors per participant, so the sensor data is augmented with information about natural body postures. The algorithm is fast, and the resulting avatar motion approximates the actions of the participant quite well. This new analytic solution resolves a problem with an earlier iterati ve algorithm that had a tendency to position knees and elbows of the a vatar in awkward and unnatural positions.