Objectives, Timeline for the Project

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Virtual Hand: a Human-Hand Simulation System for Human Computer Interactions in Virtual Environment

 

 

 

Objectives:

 

  1. The overall aim is to provide a virtual environment that is used to simulate the human hand motions in real time.
  2. 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.
  3. 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).
  4. 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.
  5. 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.


Timeline: