Objectives,
Timeline for the Project
of
Virtual
Hand: a Human-Hand Simulation System for Human Computer Interactions in
Virtual
Environment
Objectives:
- The overall aim is
to provide a virtual environment that is used to simulate the human
hand motions in real time.
- The hand model
should be based on the anatomical structure of the human hand,
integrated with hand constraints, and calibrated in a certain way. To
simulate the kinematical features of the human hand as a chain of
mechanical objects, the Denavit-Hartenburg (HT) representation will be
in-built into the model. On the other side, the deformation of the hand
in accordance with the consideration of hand constraints will be the
big issue in hand modeling to represent a variety of hand
gestures—natural hand movements.
- The hand simulation
system package, wrapped with a graphical user interface (GUI), should
follow HCI design issues. It should be able to run multiplatform and to
provide a set of application programming interfaces (APIs).
- As a simulation and
training test bed, two special applications should be combined into the
system: one is the (inverse) kinematics of the hand in the forms of
pinch and grasp functions, and another is hand ground truth data of
various hand gestures. The former will help explore (inverse)
kinematics studies in a high-DOF manipulator, especially, a robotic
hand. The later will facilitate the computer vision experiments on hand
gesture analysis and recognition with accurate hand images.
- This system will be
combined with a hand gesture recognition system (another project
currently under development at UNR). With
real hand parameters (hand configurations or status) coming from the
recognition system, the simulation system will in real time display the
effect (hand calibration, hand pose) in virtual environment.