We are pleased to announce that our research team presented their latest work titled "Dual-Point IK for Improved Avatar Animation in Smartphone AR" at the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) 2025 in Daejeon, South Korea. The paper, authored by Elhassan Makled and Wolfgang Broll, presents a novel dual-point inverse kinematics (DPIK) method that combines ARKit-based face tracking with single-point IK to achieve more accurate and expressive avatar animation using only standard smartphone hardware. In comparative tests with a commercial motion capture system and conventional single-point IK, DPIK showed the following advantages:

1. Significantly lower tracking errors

2. More consistent joint-level accuracy

3. Improved user control and steering, especially through head tracking

4. Higher scores on both pragmatic and hedonic user experience metrics

These results highlight the potential of DPIK to enable richer and more vivid social interactions on smartphone AR platforms. The publication can be found at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11220382 

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNIwyP_X1AY