VirtUs

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. The VirtUs team main objective is to create and simulate immersive populated virtual spaces where both virtual and real humans coexist, with a sufficient level of realism so that the experience lived virtually and its results can be transposed to reality. Our research first explores techniques to compose shared virtual spaces: animation techniques to move characters in a realistic way, simulations of groups and crowds of characters and authoring tools for virtual scenes. A second part of our activity is dedicated to actually exploiting our immersive simulations to: extend our knowledge on how humans interact with their digital alter egos, acquire data to improve our computational models, and evaluate the level of realism of our simulations. The articulation between the simulation tools we create and their exploitation to further improve the simulations is a strong positioning factor for the team.