Dynamic simulation of human hand motion using an anatomically correct hierarchical approach

We present a technique to realistically simulate the movements of human fingers. The technique utilises a hierarchical approach having real anatomical basis. With the dynamic simulation built upon the real human hand anatomy, not only physical correctness but also kinematics and biological correctness, which are often more important in human modelling, are guaranteed. The hierarchical approach here uses four layers of abstraction: anatomical, physical, geometry and image. The use of the hierarchical approach allows the animator to specify the hand motion without the knowledge of the underlying representations and computations. Since dynamic correctness alone is insufficient to guarantee realism in simulating human hand motion, we combine dynamics and kinematics computation to achieve naturalness. There are dependencies among motion of different fingers and realistic simulation cannot be achieved without taking the dependencies into consideration. We addressed this issue by using a mesh-based physical model of flesh around the lumbricales which simulates flesh deformation incurred in finger motion and activates execution of motion dependencies. A user interface is developed to facilitate changing of input parameters and visualisation of results