Abstract
Applications such as telepresence and training involve the display of real or synthetic humans to multiple viewers. When attempting to render the humans with conventional displays, non-verbal cues such as head pose, gaze direction, body posture, and facial expression are difficult to convey correctly to all viewers. In addition, a framed image of a human conveys only a limited physical sense of presence—primarily through the display’s location. While progress continues on articulated robots that mimic humans, the focus has been on the motion and behavior of the robots rather than on their appearance. We introduce a new approach for robotic avatars of real people: the use of cameras and projectors to capture and map both the dynamic motion and the appearance of a real person onto a humanoid animatronic model. We call these devices animatronic Shader Lamps Avatars (SLA). We present a proof-of-concept prototype comprised of a camera, a tracking system, a digital projector, and a life-sized styrofoam head mounted on a pan-tilt unit. The system captures imagery of a moving, talking user and maps the appearance and motion onto the animatronic SLA, delivering a dynamic, real-time representation of the user to multiple viewers.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Herman Towles for his insightful suggestions and technical help and advice. John Thomas provided mechanical and electronic engineering assistance. David Harrison set up our full-duplex audio subsystem. Dorothy Turner became our first non-author SLA user (Fig. 5, bottom half of image set). Tao Li helped set up the ISMAR demonstration. Donna Boggs modeled as the Avatar’s interlocutor (Fig. 2). We thank Chris Macedonia, M.D. for inspiring us by expressing his desire to visit his patients in remote hospitals and other medical facilities with a greater effectiveness than is possible with current remote presence systems, and for offering the term “prosthetic presence.” We are grateful to Brian Bradley for his appearance as a prosthetic physician at our ISMAR 2009 booth, and we thank all ISMAR participants who visited our booth and engaged both the Avatar and the researchers with questions and suggestions. Partial funding for this work was provided by the Office of Naval Research (award N00014-09-1-0813, “3D Display and Capture of Humans for Live-Virtual Training,” Dr. Roy Stripling, Program Manager).
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Lincoln, P., Welch, G., Nashel, A. et al. Animatronic shader lamps avatars. Virtual Reality 15, 225–238 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-010-0175-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-010-0175-5