Retargeting Human-Object Interaction to Virtual Avatars

Abstract

In augmented reality (AR) applications, a virtual avatar serves as a useful medium to represent a human in a different place. This paper deals with the problem of retargeting a human motion to an avatar. In particular, we present a novel method that retargets a human motion with respect to an object to that of an avatar with respect to a different object of a similar shape. To achieve this, we developed a spatial map that defines the correspondences between any points in the 3D spaces around the respective objects. The key advantage of the spatial map is that it identifies the desired locations of the avatar’s body parts for any input motion of a human. Once the spatial map is created offline, the motion retargeting can be performed in real-time. The retargeted motion preserves important features of the original motion such as the human pose and the spatial relation with the object. We report the results of a number of experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.