Motion Selection and Motion Parameter Control
Using Data Gloves
NIK ISROZAIDI NIK ISMAIL1, 2 and MASAKI OSHITA1
1Kyushu Institute of Technology, Iizuka, Fukuoka, Japan
2Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia
Abstract—We present a data-glove-based interface thatcontrols many types of motion and their styles. We use hand
positions to select a motion type and finger angles to control themotion parameters. We employ motion blending to generate thetarget motion with a set of example motion data for each type ofmotion. Finally, we intend to conduct a user experiment in which
we compare our interface with an equivalent gamepad-basedinterface.

I. INTRODUCTION
One of the most challenging aspects of computer graphics isto build a motion control interface for virtual humananimation. There is a demand for users to be able to control
many types of motion and also change the style of motion.
Currently, most interactive applications such as threedimensional computer games employ traditional input devices
such as a keyboard, mouse and gamepad. These input devices
can select only a limited number of motion types because they
have a small number of degrees of freedom. Moreover, onlypredefined motion can be performed. In some applications,such as fighting games, users wish to change the motion styleaccording to their preferences. A solution to realize the control
of motion style is motion blending. Motion blending generates
a resulting motion by blending a set of example motions withgiven motion parameters [1].
Conventional input devices are not suitable for selecting a
motion from a large number of motions and controlling
motion parameters, because it is difficult to design an interface
that can provide intuitive mapping between inputs and motion
types and that can control the motion type and parameters at
the same time. For instance, in the case of a gamepad-based
interface, one possible method of intuitive mapping is toassociate the direction of movements of the motions with theposition of gamepad buttons. For example, motions withforward movements such as walking and stepping forward canbe mapped to a combination of buttons including the up
buttons in two sets of four buttons (up, down, left, and right)
on typical gamepads. However, taking this approach, it isdifficult to define the mapping for motions with verticaldirections such as jumping, crouching and ducking. This isbecause buttons are arranged on a two-dimensional surface ofthe gamepad, while motion directions can be threedimensional. A possible way to control at most four motion
parameters with a gamepad is to use the dual analog sticks oftypical gamepads. However, it is difficult to select a motion
type and control its parameters at the same time, because both
gamepad buttons and dual analog sticks must be controlledusing thumbs.

In this paper, we propose a data-glove-based interface thatcan select many types of motion and control the motion style.
The key idea is that we use a combination of both hand
positions to select a motion type. We define mappings so thatthe motion directions are related to the hand positions. For
example, the crouching motion can be mapped to a lower
position of the hands. For style control, we use finger angles tocontrol the motion parameters.
As advantages of our interface, by using hand positions, theuser can easily guess and remember the mapping even formotions with vertical directions such as jumping. In addition,
it is easy to select a motion type and control the motion
parameters using any fingers.
II. RELATED WORK
Several researchers have explored a data-glove-based
motion control interface. Okada [2] proposed a puppet
mechanism for motion generation. The user can create themotion of an articulated figure using finger actions as in thecontrol of a puppet. He also introduced the physical constraintof gravity and ground contact to generate natural motion.
However, using his mechanism, virtual human hands, feet andneck can only be moved in one direction.
Komura and Lam [3] used joints of the index and middle
fingers and the position of a data glove to control a walking
motion. They proposed a new method to map the user’s finger
motions to the locomotion of a three-dimensional virtualhuman using preprocessing data. Employing this method, they
can only control locomotion.
Nik, Ishiguro and Oshita [4] introduced position-based
control and a motion-based control interface using data gloves.
The user can control the waist, leg or arm using thecorresponding hand positions with different control modes.
Using the motion-based control mode, a motion is selected by
the hand position. They only considered six motions and did
not employ motion blending.
III. SYSTEM OVERVIEW
The structure of our system is shown in Fig. 1. The system
consists of an interface module and a motion-generation
module.

Fig. 1. System overview

The interface module interprets input data from a positiontracking device and data gloves and sends a selected motion
type and style parameters to the motion-generation module.
The motion-generation module is based on a global motion
blending method [1] with a set of example motions for eachtype of motion and motion parameters. We plan to allow for
more than 80 types of motion. For each type of motion, weplan to use six example motions. The necessary numbers of
example motions depend on the number of motion parameters.
To blend them, we set motion parameters for each example
motion manually. The resulting motion is generated byblending example motion according to the weight calculated
from motion parameters.
IV. INTERFACE DESIGN
Figure 2 shows our interface design for motion selection(Fig. 2(a)) and motion-parameter control (Fig. 2(b)). To selecta motion type, the user needs to move one or both hands fromtheir initial position in one of 26 directions in threedimensional space. Table I gives an example of the mapping
between the hand positions and motion types.

Fig. 2. Our interface design: (a) motion selection and (b) motion parameters

Motion Types
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.

Left punch
Right kickJumping
Left block
Crouching
Walking

TABLE IEXAMPLES OF MOTION TYPES
Hand Positions
Right Hand
Left Hand
forwarddown, forwardupup
right, up, forward
down, forward
down, forward
forwardforward

In addition to motion selection, the user can control themotion parameters by bending his/her fingers. Figure 2(b)presents the example of mapping between motion parameters
and the user’s fingers. The motion parameters must be set
before selecting the motion type.
For example, the user can perform a powerful left punch
motion by bending their right thumb and left thumb to set themotion speed and angriness parameters and moving their left
hand forward to select a punching motion.
Using our interface, the same motion can be repeated bykeeping hands in the current position after the current motion
is complete. Current motion can be canceled by moving handsback to their initial positions before the motion reaches acertain point.
There are alternative ways to design a motion-control
interface using data gloves. In our system, the interface
module needs to set several motion parameters and select only

one motion type at any one time. The data types of the data
gloves and the selected motion are different. Positions,orientations and finger angles of the data gloves arecontinuous data, while the data of the motion type are onedimensional and discrete. Thus, the continuous data of data
gloves should be converted to discrete data of the motion type.
Selecting motion types using hand orientations is less accurate
when selecting a large number of motion types compared withusing hand positions because hand positions have large control
spaces compared with hand orientations. On the other hand,when using combinations of finger angles to select a motion
type, it is difficult to remember the mapping. Therefore, weassociated the directions of hand positions with the directionsof the motions. To control the motion parameters, we chose touse finger angles because they do not depend on the hand
positions.
V. USER EXPERIMENTS
We intend to conduct experiments to demonstrate theadvantages of our interface. First, we wish to demonstrate thatby using our interface, it is easy to guess and remember themapping for motions even with vertical directions. Second, wewish to demonstrate that the use of finger angles facilitates thecontrol of motion parameters and motion selection.
We will develop a gamepad interface having the sameabilities as our data-glove interface, and compare the twointerfaces. We will use combinations of gamepad buttons to
select the motions and use dual analog sticks to control themotion parameters. The subjects in our experiment will be
asked to select a motion type and motion parameters that are
randomly displayed on the screen. There are two stages to thisexperiment. In the first stage, the mapping is not shown to thesubjects and they need to guess it. This stage demonstrates
whether it is easy for the subject to guess the mapping using
our interface even for the first time. In the second stage, themapping is shown before the experiment and the subjects try
to remember it as much as possible. This stage demonstrates
whether it is easy for the subject to remember the mapping forour interface. We record the number of attempts and timerequired for each interface in both stages.
In the experiment, we expect that our data-glove interface
will require the user to make fewer attempts over a shorter
period of time to both select motions and control motion
parameters compared with the case for the gamepad interface.
REFERENCES
[1]
[2]

[3]
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IASTED International Conference on Visualization, Imaging, and Image
Processing (VIIP03), pp. 13-18, 2003.
T. Komura and C.L. Lam, "Real-time Locomotion Control by Sensing
Gloves", Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, Volume 17, Number5, pp. 513-525, 2006.
N.I. Nik Ismail, K. Ishiguro and M. Oshita, "Real-time Character Motion
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