Real-Time Gait Reconstruction For Virtual Reality Using a Single Sensor

Embodying users through avatars based on motion tracking and reconstruction is an ongoing challenge for VR application developers. High quality VR systems use full-body tracking or inverse kinematics to reconstruct the motion of the lower extremities and control the avatar animation. Mobile systems are limited to the motion sensing of head-mounted displays (HMDs) and typically cannot offer this. We propose an approach to reconstruct gait motions from a single head-mounted accelerometer. We train our models to map head motions to corresponding ground truth gait phases. To reconstruct leg motion, the models predict gait phases to trigger equivalent synthetic animations. We designed four models: a threshold-based, a correlation-based, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) -based and a bidirectional long-term short-term memory (BLSTM) -based model. Our experiments show that, while the BLSTM approach is the most accurate, only the correlation approach runs on a mobile VR system in real time with sufficient accuracy. Our user study with 21 test subjects examined the effects of our approach on simulator sickness and showed significantly less negative effects on disorientation.