The Pointman Avatar Control
Hi,
I’d like to make this community aware of a very capable, yet low cost user interface for increasing the user’s control over their avatar in ‘first-person’ & ‘tactical’ shooter games. It’s called “Pointman”.
The Immersive Simulation Lab (ISL), at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, developed Pointman over the last decade as a user interface for dismounted infantry simulation, at the squad level.
Pointman is a seated interface designed to provide a high level of control over the user’s avatar by engaging the user’s head, hands, and feet.
Pointman was originally intended for use with an HMD, however, we have been using head-coupled control over the view & aim with a fixed-screen desktop display until a viable high fidelity, low cost HMD became available. I believe the Oculus Rift DK2 may be the HMD we have been waiting for. I received a demo last week and was impressed by the significant progress made in its display & tracking capabilities.
Please take a look at the Pointman Wikipedia page for further explanation of how it works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointman_(user_interface)
There is also a YouTube video showing how it works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsEGcJummEw
Unlike the majority of simulation-based avatar controllers that use canned animations to control the avatar, Pointman provides continuous positional control over twelve degrees-of-freedom of the avatar’s posture. It employs a 6-dof positional head tracker, a dual-stick gamepad and sliding foot pedals to provide a balanced and natural assignment of control. The user moves his head and upper body to control looking and aiming, and leaning to duck and peek around cover; his hands to operate virtual weapons and direct movement; and his feet for stepping and controlling his avatar’s postural height.
To date, Pointman has only been fully integrated into the Virtual Battlespace-3 (VBS3) combined arms simulator from Bohemia Interactive Simulations, the system currently used by the Marine Corps’ Deployable Virtual Training Environment. We are currently working in-house to integrate it with the Unity game engine to support our ongoing research in expressive interaction.
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Before developing Pointman, ISL developed a full-body tracked user interface called “Gaiter”, in which the user wields a rifle prop and walks in place to walk through the virtual world. Although walking in place works fine for leisurely touring a building, it does not support the wide range of tactical movements required for combat simulation very well. Keeping the virtual rifle (seen in the HMD) aligned precisely enough with the physical rifle well to avoid negative training also remains an unsolved problem.
After this learning experience we shifted our goal from trying to achieve physical realism to seeking behavioral realism. The goal became to allow the user to make his avatar to react in the virtual world, as he would have physically moved his body in the corresponding real world situation.
-JimT
I’d like to make this community aware of a very capable, yet low cost user interface for increasing the user’s control over their avatar in ‘first-person’ & ‘tactical’ shooter games. It’s called “Pointman”.
The Immersive Simulation Lab (ISL), at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, developed Pointman over the last decade as a user interface for dismounted infantry simulation, at the squad level.
Pointman is a seated interface designed to provide a high level of control over the user’s avatar by engaging the user’s head, hands, and feet.
Pointman was originally intended for use with an HMD, however, we have been using head-coupled control over the view & aim with a fixed-screen desktop display until a viable high fidelity, low cost HMD became available. I believe the Oculus Rift DK2 may be the HMD we have been waiting for. I received a demo last week and was impressed by the significant progress made in its display & tracking capabilities.
Please take a look at the Pointman Wikipedia page for further explanation of how it works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointman_(user_interface)
There is also a YouTube video showing how it works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsEGcJummEw
Unlike the majority of simulation-based avatar controllers that use canned animations to control the avatar, Pointman provides continuous positional control over twelve degrees-of-freedom of the avatar’s posture. It employs a 6-dof positional head tracker, a dual-stick gamepad and sliding foot pedals to provide a balanced and natural assignment of control. The user moves his head and upper body to control looking and aiming, and leaning to duck and peek around cover; his hands to operate virtual weapons and direct movement; and his feet for stepping and controlling his avatar’s postural height.
To date, Pointman has only been fully integrated into the Virtual Battlespace-3 (VBS3) combined arms simulator from Bohemia Interactive Simulations, the system currently used by the Marine Corps’ Deployable Virtual Training Environment. We are currently working in-house to integrate it with the Unity game engine to support our ongoing research in expressive interaction.
------
Before developing Pointman, ISL developed a full-body tracked user interface called “Gaiter”, in which the user wields a rifle prop and walks in place to walk through the virtual world. Although walking in place works fine for leisurely touring a building, it does not support the wide range of tactical movements required for combat simulation very well. Keeping the virtual rifle (seen in the HMD) aligned precisely enough with the physical rifle well to avoid negative training also remains an unsolved problem.
After this learning experience we shifted our goal from trying to achieve physical realism to seeking behavioral realism. The goal became to allow the user to make his avatar to react in the virtual world, as he would have physically moved his body in the corresponding real world situation.
-JimT