TNA project : Visualization of grasping and manipulation of virtual object

Acronym : 68-Visualization of grasping and manipulation of virtual object-Csaba

Project Lead : Antonya Csaba From : Transilvania University of Brasov

Dates : from 21st January 2013 to 1st February 2013

Description :



Motivation and objectives :
In the past decade, computer simulations have been proliferating in industrial design applications. This trend projects ahead a future, where design concepts or detailed solutions could be evaluated by potential customers of specific products in virtual reality simulation environments. Customer evaluation of concepts plays an important role in the design of handheld devices, where the phenomenon of grasping needs to be evaluated. In these applications important information on the aspects of ergonomics and user behaviors could be gathered from computer simulation. The ultimate goal is to develop an environment in which users and designers can freely interact with product concepts.

Teams :
The research group Robotics and Virtual Reality is part of the Department of Automation, Electronics and Computers. The group has 6 permanent members, 9 PhD. student and 3 researchers.

Dates :
starting date : 21 January, 2013
ending date : 01 February, 2013

Facilities descriptions :
http://visionair-browser.g-scop.grenoble-inp.fr/visionair/Browser/Catalogs/3DICC.HU.html

Recordings & Results :
Csaba Antonya (Transilvania University of Brasov, Romania) is doing research in the fielad of Virtual Environments with special focus on virtual mechanical systems and virtual manipulation. The topic of his TNA project (21.01.2013-01.02.2013) is the visualization of grasping and manipulation of virtual objects. Grasping and manipulation of virtual objects can be done with or without force-feedback. When no haptic feedback applied the position of the fingers may not be the same as when having true feedback. In order to reconstruct and analyze the virtual grasping process it is a necessary step to study the movement of the hand and the fingers during real actions. The tracking of hand motion can be achieved by vision-based techniques or using wearable motion capture devices. The motion of the upper arm, the lower arm and the hand with all five fingers were tracked with ahigh fidelity capture system (Measurand ShapeWrap) available at MTA SZTAKI.

Conclusions :
In the course of the project, the arm and hand motion was recorded in several grasping situations with different target objects (square boxes, coffee cuos, bottles, cylindrical objects) to build a databes for further investigation. The collected motion data foster the qunatitativa motion analysis and enables the develpoment of feedback methods for virtual manipulation enhancing the quality of the existing implementations. Encouraged by the valuable results, a long term cooperation agreement has been concluded betwwen the MTA SZTAKI - 3DICC Laboratory and the Laboratory of Virtual Informatics and Robotics, Transilvania University of Brasov.