Hands on a virtually elastic object
This paper reports on the development of a system for manipulating a virtually elastic object by integrating various techniques. A sensor glove is used for interacting with the virtual object, and a virtual hand is used for visualizing the interaction between the hand and the object. Motion of the virtual hand is controlled with the sensor glove. By using a simplified hand model and a virtual object with a hierarchical representation based on a sphere-tree, collision between the fingers and the object is detected. Contact points between the virtual hand and the object are used for establishing constraints for the estimation of deformation based on the finite-element method. Experiments show that the critical process for attaining interactive response is the inversion of the stiffness matrix in finite-element analysis. The method of condensation is adopted for reducing the sizes of the matrices to be inverted. Parallel processing is used for speeding up the matrix inversion process. Test results show that an interactive response can be attained for objects with a matrix to be inverted being composed of less than 300 nodes, and the response time of the system is inversely proportional to the number of processors.
parallel processing deformable object glovebased input virtual reality