Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Real-time Locomotion Control by Sensing Gloves

This paper presents a method to control the virtual creatures by using the fingers of your hand to track the natural gait of virtual creatures. Using a p-5 glove, author has designated response of certain sensors of the glove as the motion response of the virtual creature. It is like making a stick man to walk by moving fingers on the table in a fashion resembling human gait. The two stages of the system are shown on left side.

Since such a system requires calibration for matching the finger movements with walking pattern of the character, a calibration process forms the first stage. In the calibration process, the user mimics the motion of the character on screen by fingers. After this, auto correlation between the trajectories is calculated which maps the topology of the finger movement and the movement of the virtual character. It is assumed that the character performs simple movements like walking, hopping, running and trotting.

After determining the calibration, the next step is control process in which, the player performs a new movement by the hand; then the corresponding motion of the character based on the mapping function, obtained during the calibration stage is generated and displayed in real-time. The user can change the movement of the fingers and the wrist to reproduce similar but different motions.

The system was tested using the cyber gloves and the Flocker Birds at the testing stage as P-5 are sensitive to external noise and the sensor for 3D location is not very sensitive, if hand is away from the tower. In their test users were given30 minutes to get familiarized with the system and then they were asked to do certain tasks using keyboard and the sensing gloves. It is observed that the number of collisions using the sensing gloves were less for users though time taken was more.

Discussion:

This is a simple mapping of the finger movements to simple stick type character movements in the virtual world. I can understand that the users took time while working with the sensing gloves as most of us are more familiar with the key board and obviously we would be fast using it rather than the gloves. Also, working with gloves can be tiresome as with key board pressing one key does the task while here we have to mimic each and every step by hand movements. Also in zig zag mazy movements requiring sudden turning, it could be really painful. However, over all it was a nice application for small games. I could also be useful for small virtual tours in 3D space.

1 comment:

Paul Taele said...

I've always been a fan of the WASD keys for motion because of its simplicity and ubiquitousness for these types of applications. Even though I hated this paper at first, I do like your idea of this kind of motion for virtual tours. It just seems too much of a novelty though as opposed to something research-worthy.