Real-time deformation simulation of hand-object interaction

This paper investigates the deformation simulation of hand-object interaction for the virtual rehabilitation system of hand. The deformation along the contact normal on hand and object is investigated. Following the anatomy of human hand, the virtual hand organizational structure is simplified as a 2-layered representation, of which the inner layer models the rigid skeleton, and the outer layer represents the deformable soft tissues. The object could be either rigid or elastic. This model is aimed not only to provide the visual realism, but also to enhance the force fidelity for the future work. To realize rapid computation, the deformation of the hand and the object is determined with geometry-based method. To handle the multi-point hand-object interaction, a weighted function is proposed to take the effect of the multiple contact regions on the object deformation into consider. The experimental results show that the deformation is achieved but the further improvement is still needed. The computation time is less than 1ms, which highly satisfies the real-time requirement in our virtual rehabilitation system with force rendering.