{"id":645864,"date":"2020-03-30T08:32:01","date_gmt":"2020-03-30T15:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/?p=645864"},"modified":"2020-04-23T16:46:04","modified_gmt":"2020-04-23T23:46:04","slug":"microsoft-rocketbox-avatar-library-now-available-for-research-and-academic-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/blog\/microsoft-rocketbox-avatar-library-now-available-for-research-and-academic-use\/","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft Rocketbox avatar library now available for research and academic use"},"content":{"rendered":"
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With the release of Microsoft Rocketbox as an open-source library, researchers and academics have access to 115 rigged avatars. Special care has been taken to reflect diversity in race, gender, and age, as well as attire and professional occupations.<\/p><\/div>\n

Virtual reality technology has become popular in recent years thanks to the availability of more affordable systems. Today, we can put on a head-mounted display and find ourselves in a completely different world, a virtual one in which the more we explore, the more new environments we can see and hear. However, how real a VR experience feels is quite dependent on our sense of self\u2014and others\u2014in the virtual world we have entered, an awareness realized in the form of avatars. How connected do we feel to our avatars? How realistic are the avatars around us\u2014do they fit the style of the environment, behave how we expect, smile back at us? The believability of our surroundings is enhanced by these representations (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, which makes exploring answers to questions like these and others important to the continued advancement of the technology.<\/p>\n

To empower research and academic institutions around the world to further investigate the relationship between people and their avatars and how it affects interactions with others in the virtual world, Microsoft is making the Microsoft Rocketbox library\u2014a collection of 115 avatars representing humans of different genders, races, and occupations\u2014a publicly available resource for free research and academic use. Microsoft Rocketbox can be downloaded from GitHub (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>. The release of the library coincides with last week\u2019s celebration of the 2020 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (IEEE VR) (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> and the presentation of our latest in avatar research<\/a>, an active area here at Microsoft Research.<\/p>\n

The flexibility of the Rocketbox library<\/h3>\n

Originally developed by Rocketbox Studios GmbH and later supported by Havok, which Microsoft acquired in 2015 (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, the Microsoft Rocketbox avatar library represents extensive work in research and prototyping conducted over a 10-year span. Rocketbox Studios released its first library of avatars, \u201cComplete Characters,\u201d in 2005. A new generation of highly detailed avatars and animations named \u201cComplete Characters HD\u201d was developed and released from 2010 to 2015. This is the library we\u2019re now making public.<\/p>\n

The library\u2019s avatars are rigged<\/em>, or equipped with an internal skeleton to allow easy animation, and have been used in laboratories worldwide. They\u2019re designed to give researchers needed flexibility. For example, their geometry is designed to enable mixing heads and different bodies easily, as well as mixing and matching texture elements and outfits of different characters. Thanks to the common skeletal configuration across all the avatars, it\u2019s also possible to use animation sets across all characters of the library without a need for tedious modifications. Facial animations, including eyebrows and lips, look correct on character variants. Because of these features, as well as the diversity of the characters and a selective poly resolution on the meshes, the library has been a popular research tool, used for such applications as VR, crowd simulation, and real-time avatar embodiment.<\/p>\n