Design and implementation of modular animated agents in VR using inverse kinematics and XR Toolkit

Abstract

This paper presents a reproducible pipeline for building interactive animated characters in virtual reality (VR) environments, aimed at educational and small-team research settings. The pipeline couples Blender for skeletal rigging and keyframe animation with Unity’s XR Interaction Toolkit for runtime control and interaction handling. We formalize the VR scene as a set of agents, interactive objects, and spatial trigger zones; drive character behavior with a finite-state machine over baked animation clips; and route user input, collisions, and physics- based responses through XR controllers. A functional prototype – a low-polygon VR shooter – demonstrates the feasibility of the pipeline end to end and serves as a testbed for animation control and interaction logic. Its modular, component-based architecture can be extended toward training simulators and other interaction- intensive VR scenarios, and provides a starting point for work on human–agent interaction, behavioral modeling, and procedural content generation.