Poster: A virtual body for augmented virtuality by chroma-keying of egocentric videos

Abstract

A fully-articulated visual representation of oneself in an immersive virtual environment has considerable impact on the subjective sense of presence in the virtual world. Therefore, many approaches address this challenge and incorporate a virtual model of the user's body in the VE. Such a “virtual body” (VB) is manipulated according to user motions which are defined by feature points detected by a tracking system. The required tracking devices are unsuitable in scenarios which involve multiple persons simultaneously or in which participants frequently change. Furthermore, individual characteristics such as skin pigmentation, hairiness or clothes are not considered by this procedure. In this paper we present a software-based approach that allows to incorporate a realistic visual representation of oneself in the VE. The idea is to make use of images captured by cameras that are attached to video-see-through head-mounted displays. These egocentric frames can be segmented into foreground showing parts of the human body and background. Then the extremities can be overlayed with the user's current view of the virtual world, and thus a high-fidelity virtual body can be visualized.