Recovering 3D Human-Object Interaction (HOI) from single images is challenging due to depth ambiguities, occlusions, and the huge variation in object shape and appearance. Thus, past work requires controlled settings such as known object shapes and contacts, and tackles only limited object classes. Instead, we need methods that generalize to natural images and novel object classes. We tackle this in two main ways: (1) We collect PICO-db, a new dataset of natural images uniquely paired with dense 3D contact correspondences on both body and object meshes. To this end, we use images from the recent DAMON dataset that are paired with annotated contacts, but only on a canonical 3D body. In contrast, we seek contact labels on both the body and the object. To infer these, given an image, we retrieve an appropriate 3D object mesh from a database by leveraging vision foundation models. Then, we project DAMON’s body contact patches onto the object via a novel method needing only 2 clicks per patch. This minimal human input establishes rich contact correspondences between bodies and objects. (2) We exploit our new dataset in a novel render-and-compare fitting method, called PICO-fit, to recover 3D body and object meshes in interaction. PICO-fit infers contact for the SMPL-X body, retrieves a likely 3D object mesh and contact from PICO-db for that object, and uses the contact to iteratively fit the 3D body and object meshes to image evidence via optimization. Uniquely, PICO-fit works well for many object classes that no existing method can tackle. This is crucial for scaling HOI understanding in the wild. Our data and code are available at https://pico.is.tue.mpg.de.

We formulate the motor system of an interactive avatar as a generative motion model that can drive the body to move through 3D space in a perpetual, realistic, controllable, and responsive manner. Although human motion generation has been extensively studied, many existing methods lack the responsiveness and realism of real human movements. Inspired by recent advances in foundation models, we propose PRIMAL, which is learned with a two-stage paradigm. In the pretraining stage, the model learns body movements from a large number of sub-second motion segments, providing a generative foundation from which more complex motions are built. This training is fully unsupervised without annotations. Given a single-frame initial state during inference, the pretrained model not only generates unbounded, realistic, and controllable motion, but also enables the avatar to be responsive to induced impulses in real time. In the adaptation phase, we employ a novel ControlNet-like adaptor to fine-tune the base model efficiently, adapting it to new tasks such as few-shot personalized action generation and spatial target reaching. Evaluations show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. We leverage the model to create a real-time character animation system in Unreal Engine that feels highly responsive and natural. Code, models, and more results are available at: https://yz-cnsdqz.github.io/eigenmotion/PRIMAL