Bachelor's thesis:

During my last semester as an undergraduate student, I worked on my bachelor's thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. The topic of my thesis is "Self-avatars in virtual reality: Automated validation of body shape and animation with sparse markers" and was offered to me by our group leader Betty Mohler. At that point in time, I was already active for one year in her group. As a recent topic in research, I was of course interested in it!
The following is the official abstract of my thesis, which generally describes the idea:

Especially in virtual reality, it is worth the effort to provide a personalized avatar in order to represent the own body. Although it is possible to manually create such an avatar from a 3D scan of every user, this is only feasible for special scenarios. A 3D scan requires not only expensive hardware, but also takes some time for calculation and optimization of the results depending on the desired quality. The main goal of this thesis is to make first steps towards realistically including high-resolution self-avatars into realtime applications for virtual reality and also to develop tools for further optimization of this approach. In doing so, it is built upon an already existing procedure to generate avatars from body measurements and statistical information about human bodies.

To explain my work to people who are not used to this special field of informatics, I produced a short video at the end, which is mainly focussed on the practical tasks of my thesis.

I hope your interest in this exciting topic has been aroused!

You can read my full bachelor's thesis here.

I also made the Unity projects available for download here. Since FinalIK (module for inverse kinematics) is a commercial product, I naturally had to remove it from the projects offered here. With an appropriate reference, you are welcome to use my own source code for private projects or research. For use in commercial projects, please use the contact form on my website to ask for permission beforehand.