Whole-Hand Interaction with 3D Environments

Graphical object manipulation in a computer-simulated environment holds much promise for increasing the productivity of users in a variety of occupations. Many of today’s computer interfaces, such as mice and joysticks, are ill-suited for such a task and a better interatction paradigm is required. Once such approach is the use of a graphical hand which mimics the movement of the user’s hand via an instrumented glove. While the concept of whole-hand interaction is intuitive and natural, its implementation is complex. This research note describe a VirtualHand Toolkit being developed by researchers at Virtual Technologies, Inc. More specifically, it covers the ongoing development of a “Haptic Scene Graph,” which can work in conjunction with a siumation’s master scene graph. A demonstration of a functional implementation of the toolkist will given at the workshop.