IMMERSE: IMMersive Environment for Representing Self-Avatar Easily

Recently, the importance of having a representation of the users inside Virtual Reality (VR) by using avatars, which replicate the movements of real humans, has grown in several fields of application. Nowadays, developers can use many off-the-shelf devices for visualizations and tracking. Game engines like Unity3D and Unreal allow to easily integrate packages to manage head-mounted displays and other tracking devices. However, it is still difficult to combine different solutions and achieve a full representation of the human body, e.g., combining full-body and hand tracking or switching among different tracking modalities in an easy way. This paper describes IMMERSE, an open-source framework based on Unity3D, the XR Interaction toolkit, and an inverse kinematics solver. IMMERSE allows developers to insert a VR avatar in a virtual environment, animate it through different sources of 6DOF tracking measurements, which are also interchangeable during the simulation, and finally record the movements to animate other avatars or input to motion analysis techniques.