Arne Reepen, Katrin Meng

• While Virtual Reality has been around for decades it gained new life in recent years. The release of the first consumer hardware devices allows fully immersive and affordable VR for the user at home. This availability lead to a new focus of research on technical problems as well as psychological effects. The concepts of presence, describing the feeling of being in the virtual place, body ownership and their impact are central topics in research for a long time and still not fully understood. To enable further research in the area of Mixed Reality, we want to introduce a framework that integrates the users body and surroundings inside a visual coherent virtual environment. As one of two main aspects we want to merge real and virtual objects to a shared environment in a way such that they are no longer visually distinguishable. To achieve this the main focus is not supposed to be on a high graphical fidelity but on a simplified representation of reality. The essential question is, what level of visual realism is necessary to create a believable mixed reality environment that induces a sense of presence in the user? The second aspect considers the integration of virtual persons. Can characters be recorded and replayed in a way such that they are perceived as believable entities of the world and therefore act as a part of the users environment? The purpose of this thesis was the development of a framework called Mixed Reality Embodiment Platform. This inital system implements fundamental functionalities to be used as a basis for future extensions to the framework. We also provide a first application that enables user studies to evaluate the framework and contribute to aforementioned research questions.