FootSee: an interactive animation system

We present an intuitive animation interface that uses a foot pressure sensor pad to interactively control avatars for video games, virtual reality, and low-cost performance-driven animation. During an offline training phase, we capture full body motions with a motion capture system, as well as the corresponding foot-ground pressure distributions with a pressure sensor pad, into a database. At run time, the user acts out the animation desired on the pressure sensor pad. The system then tries to see the motion only through the foot-ground interactions measured, and the most appropriate motions from the database are selected, and edited online to drive the avatar. We describe our motion recognition, motion blending, and inverse kinematics algorithms in detail. They are easy to implement, and cheap to compute. FootSee can control a virtual avatar in a fixed latency of 1 second with reasonable accuracy. Our system thus makes it possible to create interactive animations without the cost or inconveniences of a full body motion capture system.