Microsoft Rocketbox

We have used the Rock­et­box avatars is sev­er­al of our demos over the years. They are well struc­tured, easy to ani­mate and not too com­plex. We have spent a lot of time over the years build­ing alter­na­tive avatars, but always come back to using these. How­ev­er, we relied on a pur­chase we had made sev­er­al years before, and there did­n’t seem to be a way of pur­chas­ing the avatars again for exter­nal partners.

An exam­ple of our use of the Rock­et­box avatars in the paper The impact of self-avatars on trust and col­lab­o­ra­tion in shared vir­tu­al envi­ron­ments

Rock­et­box was part of Havok which was bought by Microsoft in 2015. When I was at Microsoft Research on sab­bat­i­cal in the sec­ond half of 2018/early 2019, the idea of mak­ing the avatars avail­able came up, and in March 2020, Microsoft made the Rock­et­box avatars avail­able for research free of charge. You can just check out the avatars from github. I had a small hand in set­ting this up, by con­tribut­ing a script to auto­mat­i­cal­ly fix up the avatars when loaded as .fbx files into recent ver­sions of Unity. 

More tools will be com­ing, and hope­ful­ly we will now be able to share open source ver­sions of some of our exper­i­ments to facil­i­tate repro­duc­tion and exten­sion of our work.


Antho­ny