Development of wearable hand capture detecting hand posture in immersive VR system

The objective of this study is to provide a device capable of detecting all the bending angles of finger joints at an execution speed of 60fps or higher with a high degree of accuracy to achieve the same grasping and pinching motions in an immersive VR system as those in a real space. To make the device smaller in size and lighter in weight, we propose a method for detecting the gestures of the hand with a wearable hand capture device composed of a small-size camera and a single board computer (hand posture estimation device) by estimating the hand postures through image recognition. The study group of the authors and others achieved high-speed and high-accuracy hand posture estimation by two-stage database searching using two types of image information, image shape ratio and image feature quantity. This study has selected an algorithm, which was further accelerated by compressing the dimension of the image feature quantity from 1600 to 64. Moreover, an immersive VR system integrating the test model for the device was developed to assess device performance. The result of the assessment experiment showed that many of the users may master easily how to operate the device because their own hand postures appears on the VTR system screen, suggesting that the device is useful.