UBI, The Guardian Dragon: Your Virtual Sidekick

摘要

This paper presents a form of interaction with virtual characters. A virtual character can play the role of a user's sidekick. Sidekicks interact with real and fictional characters helping them to overcome challenges. UBI, the Guardian Dragon, is a virtual sidekick that can help a user explore a space. UBI is part of vuSpot. With vuSpot we aim to design and develop an infrastructure, adaptable to a space that uses existing video cameras networks to provide means for augmenting spaces and supporting interactive experiences. vuSpot has several components, being the interaction with virtual characters one of the most important. With this component we intend to explore new forms of interaction using Augmented Reality and mobile devices. The interaction consists of performing physical actions that are captured on video and are recognized. The reaction of the characters to those actions is superimposed on the video stream that the user will visualize on the mobile device. This action-reaction environment allows a more interesting space exploration and provides means for gaming.