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 ,

Frontiers in Virtual Reality |

TECHNOLOGY AND CODE ARTICLE Front. Virtual Real. | frvir.2020.561558

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rigged avatars freely available from the Rocketbox library

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

March 24, 2020

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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MoveBox for Microsoft Rocketbox

November 22, 2020

MoveBox is a toolbox to animate the Microsoft Rocketbox avatars using motion captured (MoCap). Motion capture is performed using a single depth sensor, such as Azure Kinect or Windows Kinect V2. Our toolbox enables real-time animation of the user's avatar by converting the transformations between systems that have different joints and hierarchies.

Download Data

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.

Frontiers in Virtual Reality Online Seminar Series 2020 – “Impossible outside Virtual Reality”

In this online seminar, Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco talks about “Impossible outside Virtual Reality”. A collection of her work on avatars, perception and behaviour that are very much aiming at finding the limits of this new technology: with new ways to measure VR and to improve its adoption and understanding. Among other things she frames her research also in the context of studies that found the new theories of the Uncanny Valley of Haptics or the Self-Avatar Follower effect, and previously found enfacement and embodiment illusions. She also introduces free tools for the community to use and continue the research on the field with an embodiment questionnaire and the Microsoft Rocketbox library of avatars.

Since there was some quality drop in the video, probably due to a combination of network issues and a high resolution screen, the presentation is available here through pdf. https://jokerchen.me/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/2020-Frontiers-Seminar.pdf

Please refer to a previous talk by Dr. Eyal Ofek, in the same virtual seminar series that was presented by one of my close collaborators here at Microsoft Research. In that presentation you can find most of our work on another big area of interest that is Haptics. https://jokerchen.me/en-us/research/video/eyal-ofek-haptics-for-vr/

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Launched in December 2019, Frontiers in Virtual Reality is one of Frontiers’ newest journals, offering a dedicated open access platform for the latest work in the field of Virtual Reality.

The Editorial board of Frontiers in Virtual Reality presented a series of virtual seminars that took place over the months of the pandemic in 2020. These seminars were aimed at students, researchers and practitioners in the fields of virtual and augmented reality and its applications. Interested members of the public were also welcome.

 

Avatars: Finding a sense of self and others in the virtual world

Advancements in virtual reality and augmented reality are moving us from experiences in which digital content is confined to screens toward experiences in which users are surrounded by the digital content. However, anyone who’s entered a VR platform realizes that while they may encounter hand renderings that enable content interactions, they’re missing a key aspect of their interaction with the real world: a body. Additionally, these virtual worlds are often underpopulated with other people, or avatars, the main representations of people in these virtual scenarios.

In this webinar, Microsoft Senior Researcher Dr. Mar Gonzalez-Franco explores rigged avatars—those with internal skeletons for easier, more realistic animations—and the potential for avatars to serve not only as opportunities for user engagement but also as a substitute for the user’s own body. Such a substitution could essentially provide the user with a sense of “self” in the virtual world. Gonzalez-Franco will walk through her experiments with avatars and embodiment illusion, users’ feelings of ownership of their virtual bodies. She’ll also discuss the open-source releases of Microsoft Rocketbox avatars and Movebox toolbox, resources for creating and animating avatars in more humanlike ways.

Together, you’ll learn:

  • The fundamentals of body perception and how body perception ultimately changes user behavior
  • The utility of using rigged avatars to replace users’ bodies inside VR
  • Applications of avatars, focusing on the wide range of experiments that can be done for the study of neuroscience, sociology, and psychology
  • The importance of tools to animate avatars for use in simulations and even to train AI systems

Resource list:

Explore more Microsoft Research webinars: https://aka.ms/msrwebinars (opens in new tab)