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The word "haptics" was first thrown around on the first day of class. I honestly had no idea what it meant, and I don't recall anyone explicitly defining it. As any reasonable college student would do, I looked it up on Wikipedia. According to it, haptics is "the study of touching behavior." Awesome.
Anyway, it's about time Blogger has the same convenient saving functionality that Gmail has. Besides that, I better catch up with these blog posts or else I'll be this semester's CJ.
Summary:
Cheaper and powerful hardware has made it possible to enhance computer desktops and creating 3D applications in virtual environments. Advantages of virtual environments include allowing immersion and emulating real environments without attention to interface usages, but current implementations are lacking in interfaces, methods and paradigms for 3D manipulation, and not intuitive. The most natural way for manipulating environments is using hands, since they already exist and can be done naturally, so one promising approach is to employ a gesture recognition engine for interacting with applications naturally with hands.
Related works focus on visual capturing and interpretation of gestures. Non-invasive strategies require little or no special equipment, but need a strict environment. Invasive strategies alleviate above problems, but are expensive and require cable attachment for position sensor detection. The authors desire a system flexible and portable approach that is fast and powerful enough for reliable recognition of various gestures using a 3D analog to the mouse, so they make use of a commercial P5 glove to demonstrate that their recognition engine is powerful and flexible enough for inexpensive hardware. The glove’s sensors can track flexion of wearer’s fingers, its base station can track position and orientation using infrared sensors, and additional buttons give added functionality. The glove can provide accurate finger flexion values and dependable position value, but filtering methods must be used to account for unstable orientation information.
The authors aim for a reliable real-time recognition system that can be used on up-to-date PCs. They define gestures to be a sequence of postures, and the postures are defined as flexion values of fingers, hand orientation, and relevance of that orientation. Recognition consists of two parts: the first part being data acquisition, which receives data from the glove and matches from the gesture manager, the second part. Postures are held for about half a second to prevent misrecognition, and then are matched in the gesture manager. If distance and orientation are within a certain value, then it is recognized. To demonstrate this system, the authors set up a virtual office environment seen with a special 3D device and a normal monitor. This environment allows for virtual manipulation like in a real one. Users commented on its ease-of-use past the initial difficulties of learning the system.
Discussion:
This is a great overview paper to introduce people to the world of haptics. For what it is, readers can see how affordable commercial equipment can be adjusted to accomplish natural interaction in a virtual environment. Implementing this at a mainstream level is just a theory though. Without any numbers to justify how accurate the system is beyond a limited prototype demonstration, it’s hard to know how well their gesture recognition system scales to wider environments or performs with a broader audience. If the numbers can justify the potential of their system, it’s simply a matter of creating killer applications that can bring this type of technology into the mainstream.
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