AnimationVR - Interactive Controller-based Animating in Virtual Reality

Creating animations can be a tedious and complicated process. The traditional way of animating with keyframes challenges beginners with a steep learning curve. In research, different approaches have been evaluated to make animation creation more accessible. However, most of the research was focused on 2D animations [2] and solutions for 3D animations lacked a streamlined workflow [15]. The proposed solution, AnimationVR, uses the virtual reality system HTC Vive to enable the user to animate characters and objects directly in 3D space with the help of the 6-DoF HTC Vive controllers. In comparison to traditional keyframe-based methods, users create animations by acting them out with the puppeteering technique. AnimationVR is written as a plugin for the Unity engine and can, therefore, be easily integrated into already existing Unity projects. The plugin was evaluated with four animation experts. The consensus was that AnimationVR accelerates the workflow while reducing the precision of the animation. In professional environments, this tradeoff leads to use cases as animation prototyping, storyboarding, and previsualization. For beginners, AnimationVR offers an easy introduction to animating and could further be used for semiprofessional animation creation.