Virtual Hand Representations to Support Natural Interaction in Immersive Environment

Immersive Computing Technology (ICT) offers designers the unique ability to evaluate human interaction with product design concepts through the use of stereo viewing and 3D position tracking. These technologies provide designers with opportunities to create virtual simulations for numerous different applications. In order to support the immersive experience of a virtual simulation, it is necessary to employ interaction techniques that are appropriately mapped to specific tasks. Numerous methods for interacting in various virtual applications have been developed which use wands, game controllers, and haptic devices. However, if the intent of the simulation is to gather information on how a person would interact in an environment, more natural interaction paradigms are needed. The use of 3D hand models coupled with position-tracked gloves provide for intuitive interactions in virtual environments. This paper presents several methods of representing a virtual hand model in the virtual environment to support natural interaction

Virtual reality for assembly methods prototyping: a review

Assembly planning and evaluation is an important component of the product design process in which details about how parts of a new product will be put together are formalized. A well designed assembly process should take into account various factors such as optimum assembly time and sequence, tooling and fixture requirements, ergonomics, operator safety, and accessibility, among others. Existing computer-based tools to support virtual assembly either concentrate solely on representation of the geometry of parts and fixtures and evaluation of clearances and tolerances or use simulated human mannequins to approximate human interaction in the assembly process. Virtual reality technology has the potential to support integration of natural human motions into the computer aided assembly planning environment (Ritchie et al. in Proc I MECH E Part B J Eng 213(5):461–474, 1999). This would allow evaluations of an assembler’s ability to manipulate and assemble parts and result in reduced time and cost for product design. This paper provides a review of the research in virtual assembly and categorizes the different approaches. Finally, critical requirements and directions for future research are presented

A survey of haptics in serious gaming

Serious gaming often requires high level of realism for training and learning purposes. Haptic technology has been proved to be useful in many applications with an additional perception modality complementary to the audio and the vision. It provides novel user experience to enhance the immersion of virtual reality with a physical control-layer. This survey focuses on the haptic technology and its applications in serious gaming. Several categories of related applications are listed and discussed in details, primarily on haptics acts as cognitive aux and main component in serious games design. We categorize haptic devices into tactile, force feedback and hybrid ones to suit different haptic interfaces, followed by description of common haptic gadgets in gaming. Haptic modeling methods, in particular, available SDKs or libraries either for commercial or academic usage, are summarized. We also analyze the existing research difficulties and technology bottleneck with haptics and foresee the future research directions

SHARP: A System for Haptic Assembly and Realistic Prototyping

Virtual Reality (VR) technology holds promise as a virtual prototyping tool for mechanical assembly; however, several developmental challenges still need to be addressed before virtual prototyping applications can successfully be integrated into the product realization process. This paper describes the development of SHARP (System for Haptic Assembly & Realistic Prototyping), a portable VR interface for virtual assembly. SHARP uses physically-based modeling for simulating realistic part-to-part and hand-to-part interactions in virtual environments. A dual handed haptic interface for realistic part interaction using the PHANToM® haptic devices is presented. The capability of creating subassemblies enhances the application’s ability to handle a wide variety of assembly scenarios. Swept volumes are implemented for addressing maintainability issues and a network module is added for communicating with different VR systems at dispersed geographic locations. Support for various types of VR systems allows an easy integration of SHARP into the product realization process resulting in faster product development, faster identification of assembly and design issues and a more efficient and less costly product design process

Smart Glove for Augmented and Virtual Reality

This research work is carried out on designing and prototyping a smart glove, which can conduct 3D interaction with computer MATLAB model in real time. The smart glove is constructed with only inertial measurement units for gathering and achieving human hand movement position data. This application will support the accuracy of the device and provide additional flexibilities for human interaction with other objects. The purpose of our design is to provide a smart glove with low price (less than 100€) for researchers in different institutions to develop their research projects with virtual and augmented reality. The design of hardware and software, as well as prototyping experiments is also presented

Modeling of micro-scale touch sensations for use with haptically augmented reality

Possessing dexterity and sensory perceptions, the human hand is a versatile tool that can grasp, hold, and manipulate objects using various postures and forces interacting with the environment. Many industrial tasks are replacing human hands with anthropomorphic robotic hands. In skillful tasks such as micro surgical operations, a master-slave interface system of robotic hands is required to emulate a human hand\u27s dexterity by using glove controllers with force sensors for telemanipulation. Although these interface techniques are widely applied for large scale robots, little has been accomplished for micro-scale robots due to the constraints and complexity imposed by miniaturization. To provide sensible haptic control and feedback from robots at the micro-level, this work investigates the intricacies associated with the use of micro-scale robotic actuators with the intention of using them with haptic feedback systems. This work also develops a system model to test the ability of computing elements that emulate a microrobotic hand\u27s tactile perception of stiffness. An interface glove was used to collect control data from the user, which was used alongside a Matlab model to simulate the operation and control of two different microhand designs. In order to control the microhand device accurately, feedback from simulated sensors was used to affect the airflow of the pneumatic system driving the displacement of the microhand. Four major components were developed for the overall system. The glove interface gives the operator a method to interact with the system. The microhand modeling took place in two components. The first component was the model of the microhand itself. The other component needed was a pneumatic subsystem to drive the microhand operation. The final major component developed was a graphical user interface to give the operator feedback as to what is happening in the target environment. The integration of all of these components allows for experimentation of the intricacies of operating with these microhand devices. The investigation of this micro-haptic system shows that some parameters make the system perform faster and more accurately than others. Metrics such as percent error and settling time of the displacement of one micro-finger are shown to measure success of each method. Future improvements for this system could include the integration of pneumatically controlled balloon micro-actuators with the operator\u27s glove interface or implementing more accurate contact mechanics into the model