Generating Leg Animation for Walking-in-Place Techniques using a Kinect Sensor

We present a kinematic approach based on animation rigging to generating real-time leg animation. Our main approach is to track vertical in-place foot movements of a user using a Kinect v2 sensor and map tracked foot height to the motions of inverse kinematics (IK) targets. We align two IK targets with an avatar's feet and guide the virtual feet to perform cyclic walking motions using a set of kinematic equations. Preliminary testing shows that this approach can produce compelling real-time forward-backward leg animation during in-place walking.