Bodylab

Bodylab - in virtuo sculpting, painting and performing of full-body avatars

Bodylab is a virtual reality (VR) system designed to explore the creative potential of full-body avatars and virtual embodiment. 

It provides anatomically realistic mannequins as canvases, which can be freely adjusted in size and weight. Using fully body tracking, the user can embody the canvases and position them as they wish.

The blank body canvases can then, from inside VR, be painted and textured, sculpted and deformed, adorned with objects and animated with particle effects.

The artist can work from a first or third person perspective, or with a virtual mirror or virual clone, and variety of interaction modalities are made available. 

Research Questions

The goal of this project is to explore the creative potential of full-body avatars and virtual embodiment. We ask:

• How virtual reality can be used to rapidly create or modify full-body avatars?
• What kinds of interaction modalities and virtual tools are desirable?
• And what are the benefits and challenges of embodying an avatar during the act of creating the avatar? 

Applications

Bodylab has been used for real-time imagery in the live dance performance "Betwixt & Between" directed by Vinzenz Schechner, at the Dresden Academy for Art (HfBK) in 2023

Additionally, the system can be applied to the study of embodiment and other somatic perceptual and cognitive concerns. The system is currently being used to design experiments in how the embodiment influences perceived affordances, and has already been used to study the potential of embodied systemic therapy in virtual reality  [LINK].

Videos

Publications

• Daniel Zeidler and Matthew McGinity. 2023. Bodylab: in virtuo sculpting, painting and performing of full-body avatars. Proc. ACM Comput. Graph. Interact. Tech. 6, 2, Article 22 (August 2023). https://doi.org/10.1145/3597631

Student Theses

• Embodying Arbitrary Meshes in Virtual Reality through Full-Body Interactions, Emelie Radziwill, 2023.
• Immersive Animatronics: Animating Multi-Limbed Avatars in VR, Ranim Zarour, 2023.

Partners

Live dance performance "Betwixt & Between" directed by Vinzenz Schechner, Dresden 2023