Actor Takeover of Animated Characters

With the rise in accessibility of consumer-grade virtual reality headsets, social virtual reality applications have now caught widespread attention. One's anticipation for the virtual world is for it to be lively with characters. However, current technology falls short of generating intelligent virtual agents, thus creating a densely-populated environment with which one could have a variety of interactions is out of reach. This position paper introduces a takeover system which enables a single actor to seamlessly take over control of multiple virtual characters in a social virtual reality environment. In our experiments, we expect our system to enhance the perceived social presence of the scene and to uncover the difference in perception regarding computer-driven agents and human controlled avatars when interacting with multiple characters in the same environment.