HiAvA investigates and develops technologies for enabling multi-user applications in Social VR, mitigating the challenges of social distancing. The goal is to improve upon current solutions by maintaining immersion and social presence even on hardware devices that only allow for limited tracking or rendering. The resulting system should exceed the capabilities of current video communication in terms of scalability, immersion and comfort. Our group contributes work on AI-based models for the speech-driven generation of non-verbal behavior of human avatars, in particular meaningful human-like gesticulation that is suitable for use with avatar-based face-to-face interaction systems.
