Implementation and Initial Evaluation of Virtually Transformable Plushies

Abstract

In this paper, we propose virtual-reality-based transformable plushies. This system replaces the appearance of a plushie into another appearance in the virtual world. The user could feel like as if he/she is virtually playing with a plushie that has different size and appearance though the actual plushie never changes. We developed a prototype system "VRushie" and conducted some evaluation experiments. From the results, we obtained two findings: (1)The subjects were tolerant to the increasing scale transformation of virtual plushies. (2)The subjects were not so tolerant to the whole appearance transformation unless the virtual and real plushies have common body parts.