A 4-layer flexible virtual hand model for haptic interaction

Virtual hand interactions play key roles in virtual environments. The recent addition of force feedback to virtual reality simulations has enhanced their realism, especially when dexterous manipulation of virtual objects is concerned. In the past decades, much effort has been made on virtual hand modeling from the perspectives of computer animation and human computer interaction. However, much less attention is paid on haptic modeling of flexible virtual hand. In this paper, we propose a 4-layer flexible virtual hand model for virtual hand haptic interaction. The skin layer, kinematics layer, collision detection layer and haptic layer are integrated into a sophisticated virtual hand to simulate the human hands natural anatomy in its appearance and motion, and to reflect the area contact feature of force feedback data gloves. The infrastructure and details of the flexible virtual hand model are discussed. Experimental results show that the proposed flexible virtual hand demonstrates good performance in virtual hand haptic applications.