In order to make haptically-enabled Virtual Reality applications more comfortable and easy to use, an important aspect consists of visually rendering a 3D avatar of the human hand, to be animated in the virtual scenario. Our approach is based on modeling an avatar which can be animated using commercial haptic devices such as the Omega or the PHANToM, featuring a single contact point per finger. Such devices allow to capture only fingertips motion, hence the avatar animation control is computed thanks to an inverse kinematics solver based on a biomechanical hand model. We developed a preliminary system which implements the proposed animation control technique.
One future perspective we have already planned is realizing a hand mesh that could locally get deformed during the contacts with virtual objects, eventually deformable too. We will take into account contacts that involve entire areas instead of single points. In haptics, simulating such kind of contacts is a challenging objective: first, we will study suitable transformations to map the global interaction force stemming from an entire contact-area into a single force localized at the fingertips. Secondly, from the computational point of view, rendering performance will be improved exploiting parallel computation on GPUs, developing GPU-based multi-rate algorithms for fast deformable collision detection and for local contact-area deformations.
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