Using Kinect for hand tracking and rendering in wearable haptics

Wearable haptic devices with poor position sensing are combined with the Kinect depth sensor by Microsoft. A heuristic hand tracker has been developed. It allows for the animation of the hand avatar in the virtual reality and the implementation of the force rendering algorithm: the position of the fingertips is measured by the hand tracker designed and optimized for Kinect, and the rendering algorithm computes the contact forces for wearable haptic display. Preliminary experiments with qualitative results show the effectiveness of the idea of combining Kinect and wearable haptics.