Physics-based assistive grasping for robust object manipulation in virtual reality

Abstract

In this paper, an effective, interactive grasping algorithm is proposed to provide physically realistic interactions in the virtual world. We have provided a solution to lacking dynamic control resulting in penetrations and frictionless contact due to kinematic virtual hand provided by hand-tracking devices, by including a proxy hand in the system. The introduced proxy hand not only provides correct visual feedback but also is used to simulate dynamics between the hand and virtual objects. Our method also provides semiautonomous assistive grasping, coupled with physics-based grasping, which makes the system help the user in achieving a grasp by identifying grasp pose and orienting the object in the hand to be grasped robustly. We have implemented and evaluated our technique with various benchmarks, conducted a user study to compare our method against the state-of-the-art, pinch-based grasping mechanism, and showed that our technique provides physically realistic, stable, and time-efficient real-time interactions. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.