FlyingHand: extending the range of haptic feedback on virtual hand using drone-based object recognition
Teams: Osaka University，University of Toronto
Writers: T. Duan, P. Punpongsanon, D. Iwai, and K. Sato
Publication date: Dem 2018
Abstract
The range in which human could feel and examine the world is sometimes limited by the body size and movement capabilities, especially for aging or disabilities groups. When a certain individual wants to examine the surrounding environment, the most intuitive way is to walk around, use the eyes to view and use the hands to feel the objects in the environment. However, there are countless scenarios, where users are either inconvenient to move or the environment itself is not suitable or reachable for users to explore.
Virtual Reality (VR) has brought up the virtual body extension applications to reach and explore the virtual world. By fitting users’ actual hand to the existing hand model in virtual reality, users could explore the environment by extending the length of the arm virtually. However, this virtual body extension technique is still limited in terms of exploration range and its body ownership. Thus, it is only applicable in surrounding environment exploration while users treat the virtual hand as an auxiliary device. Users could not take advantage of the technique when they want to reach a further location, or get more texture details from the interaction object.
