Hand Contact between Remote Users through Virtual Avatars

We present an avatar animation technique for a telepresence system that allows for the hand contact, especially handshaking, between remote users. The key idea is that, while the avatar follows the remote user's motion normally, it modifies the motion to create and maintain hand contact with the local user when the two users try to engage hand contact. To this end, we develop the support vector machine (SVM)-based classifiers to recognize the users' intention for contact interaction, and online motion generation method to create realistic image sequence of an avatar to realize the continuous contact with the user. A user study has been conducted to verify the effect of our method on the social telepresence.