Inclusive Avatar System
In building an inclusive avatar system as part of our British Academy research, we wanted to see a potentially huge variety of body shapes that stretch the normative representation of a dancer’s body while offering them meaningful opportunities for agency and expression. We have achieved this through a complex system of blend shapes, with the deliberate omission of specific cultural markers or realist aesthetics. This is a dancer character system that emphasises body shape and movement over costume, facial expression, or specific aesthetic affects.
Objectives
Our goal is to create inclusive immersive platforms for dance that are easy to use, intuitive, relatively affordable, and which can get people engaging creatively with each other through movement and meaningful action.
Most user-accessible 3D character creator tools such as Mixamo or Blender use standardised body shapes for avatars, that fit clearly within generic aesthetics, are often gender normative, or represent only a narrow set of types of body even when they may offer a multitude of different skin tones or hair-styles.
This is a problem for dance in particular, where the shape of a body is incredibly important in defining how an individual can move in unique ways. The diversity of dancer bodies may also include those with limbs removed, never there to begin with, or with prosthetics - all of which can dance in their own way. Accurate body representation is important to many people, as it is intimately tied to their agency and capacities for movement expression, as much as it is about seeing and recognising oneself.
There is no Swiss Army Knife of avatar character creation – not yet anyway (though AI systems show promise in this area). What we offer here as an open-source system for avatar creation is one consideration of what a full inclusive system could be.
How to use the system
Both offered assets are open-source and free to use for your personal and commercial with acknowledgement (Goldsmiths Mocap Streamer).
1- Download the .fbx file
The asset contains a series of blend shapes and meshes to customise the character's body shape and gender representation
2- Download the Unity package
In this example project, you will find a series of sliders to control the customisation of the character, including a logic between each of the blend shapes to change the shape/size of certain parts of the body in relation to each other (eg upper leg and lower leg). The package also contains a customisable shader with additional meshes to show/hide certain body parts and use prosthetics.
