Full-Body Motion Capture-Based Virtual Reality Multi-Remote Collaboration System

Abstract

Various realistic collaboration technologies have emerged in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as existing virtual reality (VR) collaboration systems generally employ an inverse kinematic method using a head-mounted display and controller, the user and character cannot be accurately matched. Accordingly, the immersion level of the VR experience is low. In this study, we propose a VR remote collaboration system that uses motion capture to improve immersion. The system uses a VR character in which a user wearing motion capture equipment performs the same operations as the user. Nevertheless, an error can occur in the virtual environment when the sizes of the actual motion capture user and virtual character are different. To reduce this error, a technique for synchronizing the size of the character according to the user’s body was implemented and tested. The experimental results show that the error between the heights of the test subject and virtual character was 0.465 cm on average. To verify that the implementation of the motion-capture-based VR remote collaboration system is possible, we confirm that three motion-capture users can collaborate remotely using a photon server.

Human-Centric Digital Twins in Industry: A Comprehensive Review of Enabling Technologies and Implementation Strategies

“…Optical marker-based devices, comprising active and passive markers, such as Optitrack (https://optitrack.com/ (accessed on 12 December 2022)) and VICON (https://www.vicon.com/ (accessed on 12 December 2022)), are widely used for human motion tracking. On the other hand, optical marker-less technology and video-based human motion tracking devices, including RGB-D cameras [32,33], infrared cameras [34,35], and Kinect [36][37][38][39], are also extensively used in literature. Non-optical tracking devices include wearable inertial and magnetic measurement units (IMUs) [40], and magnetometers have been used in the past to track human movements, trajectory, and position while collaborating with cobots.…”