Embodied Realistic Avatar System with Body Motions and Facial Expressions for Communication in Virtual Reality Applications

Providing effective communication in virtual reality (VR) applications requires body language and facial expressions to transmit users’ thoughts and behavior. Embodied VR is an effective way to realistically render users’ movements onto a virtual avatar in a virtual environment in real time. There are many VR applications that utilize this technique; however, most of them have limitations in photorealistic realism, body motion, and facial expressions. In this work, we introduce a novel VR communication system that mimics users’ movements, facial expressions, and speech in order to render these capture data into different types of avatar representations in real-time. This system could be beneficial for any type of VR application that requires avatar-based communication in a 3D immersive virtual environment.