VirtUs is the code name for a joint project-team from Inria and the Universities of Rennes 1 and Rennes 2, which is positioned at the interface between digital science and motion science. It is situated in the D5 scientific department of Irisa, alongside teams which work in the area of Virtual Reality, Virtual Humans, Interactions and Robotics.
The research within the VirtUs team centres around simulation of populated virtual spaces where virtual and real humans coexist. It is interested in the following research axes:
- NextGen Virtual Characters
This axis in concerned with believable and engaging behaviour of virtual characters, which act autonomously and consistently across a large set of situations. These characters could, for example, convey personality traits and emotions which their expressiveness of their animation. They move appropriately according to the objects and environment. Machine learning as well as procedural techniques are explored in this axis to create or adjust existing motions.
- Populated dynamic worlds
We aim at developing techniques to design populated environments i.e., how to define and control the activity of large numbers of virtual humans as well as to enable them to autonomously interact together, perform group actions and collective behaviours. The aim is to study and simulate lively, complex and believable behaviours according to realistic situations and locations (railway station, park, inside a building), which ties as well into the first research axis, and to deliver tools for authoring such crowded scenes.
- New immersive experiences
This axis addresses the challenge of designing novel immersive experiences, which builds on the innovations from the first two research axes to design VirtUs simulators placing real users in close interaction with virtual characters. Placing virtual characters in relation to the user enables us to study increasingly more complex and ecological situations as well as gives the option of evaluating more subtle behaviors (e.g., reactivity, expressiveness), to improve immersion protocols. A strong emphasis in this axis is therefore also on the methods of evaluation and perception of the users when they are immersed with the character in a virtual scene.
